Nick Harkaway sees parallels with postwar period as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold comes to the West End
Russia’s war in Ukraine has reignited “cold war strategies”, according to the son of John le Carré, who announced that an adaptation of his father’s classic novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is coming to the West End for the first time….
The play’s director, David Eldridge, said the initial idea for the adaptation came at around the same time as the novichok poisoning in Salisbury, which raised the question of how a country reacts to such an attack. “Should you respond in kind, so that you can defeat your enemy?” Eldridge said. “But in doing so, do you compromise your value system?”…
When Eldridge met Le Carré, before his death in 2020, the novelist told him “not to get carried away with the idea that intelligence officers are a special breed in some way”, repeatedly saying that they’re just “ordinary people”. Eldridge said his adaptation was true to that idea.