Mister 8

In following up on pt. I, which covered a pair of my favorite scene descriptions from espionage novels and built on Jason Whiton’s excellent series on set design at Spy Vibe, it suddenly occurred to me that if I’m going to to a series on non-film sets, then I should, by the very nature of the discussion, offer an entry on the theatre.

The first problem with such a venture comes in the circumstance that I’ve never lived in a place that offered much more than community theatre, and the second comes from the fact that each troupe or venue’s performance of a play or musical has its own individual take on set design. So more than answering the question, “What are the best set designs in espionage-related plays or musicals?” this week’s effort was devoted more to answering the question, “Are there espionage-related plays or musicals?”

The most obvious pick, especially after last year’s Mamma Mia-inspired ABBA renaissance, might be the musical Chess, with music by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and book / lyrics by Tim Rice. The musical has undergone numerous changes over the years, but the story always remains entrenched in the politics of the Cold War, with KGB agents and defections and secret romances taking place against the backdrop of international chess tournaments.

I’ve scoured the web for video of performances of Chess, and have found one element that the sets have in common. As you may have guessed, the floor of the stage is tiled to look like a giant chess board. In the original London production of the play, this effect was achieved through tiled lights that could be isolated to spotlight characters from below (this is a poor quality video, but seems to be one of the few surviving from this era of the performance):

This chessboard floor was carried over in the video for the song “One Night in Bangkok,” released as a single by the play’s star, Murray Head:

Sympathy Jones is an off-Broadway musical seeking to graduate, about a secretary in a secret agency with aspirations of becoming a super spy on her own. The musical was given a try out at the 2007 New York Musical Theater Festival with Kate Shindle playing the lead role. I’m not sure what’s happened to it since, but you can read an excerpt from the script and hear most of the musical’s songs on the website of composer/author Masi Asare.

Here’s a picture of what I imagine was a bare-bones production of the musical, from the NY Musical Theater Festival:

One play currently running that I hope to catch is called Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Steps, and it’s running, I believe, simultaneously in West End and on Broadway. A comedy that draws on the novel and the Hitchcock film from 1935, the play looks to use minimalist sets for comedic effect, and also uses the balconies of the theater itself for part of the action.

A last offering, of which I’ve ordered a text copy to read myself, is Tom Stoppard’s Hapgood. The plot, as with most Stoppard works, seems to be a loose dance around densely packed concepts. The Times, in 2008, ran a fantastic interview with Stoppard about the play, which features a female spymaster, from which I take this excerpt:

In this case, Stoppard’s obsession was particle physics, which his son Oliver was studying at PhD level while the play was being written. (Stoppard has four sons, two by his first marriage to Josie Ingle, two -- including the actor Ed -- by his second, to Dr Miriam Stoppard, née Moore-Robinson). Stoppard saw in physics a metaphor for human nature. Does light operate like a bullet or a wave? The answer is, both -- depending on whether it’s being observed or not. So too people, who have different selves sharing the one body, which appear or disappear depending on who’s looking.

Stoppard alighted on “the world of John le Carré” as the form to accommodate these ideas, he says, “because both quantum physics and espionage relate to the ultimate impossibility of observing the truth of a situation; of ever knowing what’s truly happening.” The result was a play that constantly confounds the viewer’s expectations, and whose mix of physics and spying achieves what Michael Frayn later took two separate plays (Copenhagen and Democracy) to cover adequately.

But times have changed since Hapgood was written. The play is infused with a Cold War sensibility -- as is Stoppard’s earlier Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, a musical collaboration with André Previn set in a Soviet mental institution, which the National Theatre will revive in August. Stoppard is confident the plays will still resonate, not least because Hapgood “doesn’t really belong in any realistic period at all,” he says. It paints a “sweetly domestic” picture of espionage, in which the eponymous female spymaster “seems to be working for MI5. She’s not quite 5 and she’s not quite 6.” This imprecision much embarrassed Stoppard when he eventually met le Carré. “He was sweet about Hapgood, but I knew perfectly well that to him it was complete codswallop.”

As far as sets go, I’ve found few pictures of the production online. But I did find this, which for some reason delights me to no end:

So what am I missing? Was there a scene in Oklahoma where Ali Hakim’s spy ring was exposed? Did Chekhov cut Konstantin’s role as secret agent? Why did I think Neil Simon wrote The In-Laws? Let me know in the comments section!