Single Spies & Talking Heads
Alan Bennett is best known in this country as a member—along with Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook—of the remarkable quartet that wrote and performed the never-to-be- forgotten revue called Beyond the Fringe. Since then he has become one of Britain's most successful and most respected playwrights. This volume introduces the American public to perhaps his greatest hit, Single Spies, the double bill that was the smash hit of the 1989 London theatre season. In two dazzling one-act plays— the first about Guy Burgess's life in Moscow. after he defected; the second portraying an imaginary confrontation between Anthony Blunt, the notorious "fourth man" and the Queen—Mr. Bennett performs a wickedly funny and profoundly disturbing dissection of Britain's celebrated espionage scandals, raising important questions about the meaning of patriotism and the nature of treason. The two plays dovetail perfectly. As The New York Times drama critic Frank Rich wrote in his review of the London production, "Both halves are essential to Mr. Bennett's unusually deep perspective on the juiciest and most voluminously chronicled of modern espionage trials." Talking Heads, six monologues which have been performed on BBC-TV, reveal another side of Mr. Bennett's talent—an acute sensitivity to the small tragedies and triumphs of everyday life which are so often simultaneously hilarious and deeply moving. Two of them shown in this country on public television have already proved memorable. In one, Maggie Smith depicts a minister's wife with a drinking problem, and in the other Mr. Bennett himself takes on the role of a middle-aged man still dependent on his mother, who is distressed when she takes up with an old boyfriend.