While the Almeida wanted us to fix our sights on future constitutional clashes, a revival of Another Country at the increasingly impressive Trafalgar Studios sent us hurtling back in time to the era just before the Abdication and a hothouse of a public school where beatings and bullying are rife and homosexuality is repressed in theory but abundant in practice.
It is hard to improve on the Eighties version of Julian Mitchell's dramatic re-creation of the schooling and social attitudes that might have produced the Cambridge ring of self-hating spies. Memories of Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Day-Lewis as unlovable but pitiful youths are hard to compete against.
In this Chichester Festival Theatre production, three decades on, the action is brisk, the world that of arcane clubs, self-advancement and adults who are either airily absent or downright exploitative.
Rob Callender gives a commanding performance as Guy Bennett, based on the young Guy Burgess, a blend of sexual chutzpah and golden self-certainty, masking a tortured recognition that his sexuality will always condemn him to the outer edges of good society.
It is harder for contemporary audiences to warm to his sternly Marxist friend Tommy (Will Attenborough) than in the more divided ideological climate of the early Eighties, though the boy's meditations on the expansive glories of the Soviet system have an eerie echo as Moscow cracks the whip once again in Ukraine.
Perhaps it is too easy for today's audiences to tut and shake their heads at the barbarism of the prewar public school system. Yet the panic of the opening scenes, with the school in uproar over the disclosure of a liaison between a master and a pupil, reminded me of the terror that still stalks public schools when something reputation-affecting occurs.
When one of the school's celebrated alumni (Julian Wadham) shows up to patronise the boys and generally show off his existence as an out-and-proud Bloomsbury aesthete, the moral dilemma presents itself rather differently to the simple requirement of sexual tolerance.
To the young Bennett, the louche visitor is a sign that gay life can be lived openly and his invitation to "bring a friend" to one of his parties a moment of seedy promise. In the post-Savile climate, that sends a potent shudder down the spine.
Prejudices shift: but so, more subtly, do the parameters of acceptability about sex and the borderline between freedom and exploitation. To that extent, Another Country is as much a play about the attitudes of Eighties as it is about the Thirties. It's also hard to ignore a streak of excuse-making about the betrayals committed by Blunt, Burgess et al.
Even if boarding school horrors played their part in deforming character, Ben Macintyre's excellent new book on Kim Philby reminds us that it was repeated adult calculation that drove them to send other, far less privileged people to their deaths for motives more informed by resentment than conviction. It's stretching matters to blame the Upper Fourth for that.
It is hard to improve on the Eighties version of Julian Mitchell's dramatic re-creation of the schooling and social attitudes that might have produced the Cambridge ring of self-hating spies. Memories of Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Day-Lewis as unlovable but pitiful youths are hard to compete against.
In this Chichester Festival Theatre production, three decades on, the action is brisk, the world that of arcane clubs, self-advancement and adults who are either airily absent or downright exploitative.
Rob Callender gives a commanding performance as Guy Bennett, based on the young Guy Burgess, a blend of sexual chutzpah and golden self-certainty, masking a tortured recognition that his sexuality will always condemn him to the outer edges of good society.
It is harder for contemporary audiences to warm to his sternly Marxist friend Tommy (Will Attenborough) than in the more divided ideological climate of the early Eighties, though the boy's meditations on the expansive glories of the Soviet system have an eerie echo as Moscow cracks the whip once again in Ukraine.
Perhaps it is too easy for today's audiences to tut and shake their heads at the barbarism of the prewar public school system. Yet the panic of the opening scenes, with the school in uproar over the disclosure of a liaison between a master and a pupil, reminded me of the terror that still stalks public schools when something reputation-affecting occurs.
When one of the school's celebrated alumni (Julian Wadham) shows up to patronise the boys and generally show off his existence as an out-and-proud Bloomsbury aesthete, the moral dilemma presents itself rather differently to the simple requirement of sexual tolerance.
To the young Bennett, the louche visitor is a sign that gay life can be lived openly and his invitation to "bring a friend" to one of his parties a moment of seedy promise. In the post-Savile climate, that sends a potent shudder down the spine.
Prejudices shift: but so, more subtly, do the parameters of acceptability about sex and the borderline between freedom and exploitation. To that extent, Another Country is as much a play about the attitudes of Eighties as it is about the Thirties. It's also hard to ignore a streak of excuse-making about the betrayals committed by Blunt, Burgess et al.
Even if boarding school horrors played their part in deforming character, Ben Macintyre's excellent new book on Kim Philby reminds us that it was repeated adult calculation that drove them to send other, far less privileged people to their deaths for motives more informed by resentment than conviction. It's stretching matters to blame the Upper Fourth for that.
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