A SPLINTER OF ICE AT THE ARTS THEATRE
Compelling and convincing - Oliver Ford Davies as Graeme Greene and a superb Karen Ascoe as Mrs.Philby
Everything about A Splinter of Ice, the play that opened last night reminded me of just how much I had missed theatre. And not even realized I had. After all , it’s not as if there aren’t films galore on screens every night. Yet the magical process of two superb actors capable of drawing an audience into their world, worked all over again. This play shimmers with innuendo. In it you visit the post- war world of Vienna in The Third Man ( Greene’s most famous book) and, the fifties in Cambridge where so much espionage changed lives forever lined as it was with the cold hard world of Soviet Russia where the play begins at the 1987 Peace Conference.
Who could claim the title as ‘most subversive man’ in the twentieth century? Two names slide from the shadows – the great novelist Graeme Greene its most far travelled and hard.-living adventurous writer or possibly the master spy Kim Philby, manipulator extraordinary, escape artist and fictive inspiration for novelists from John le Carre who worked for him and despised him as a cold hearted traitorous charlatan - and- a surprise to me - Graeme Greene who worked for him when a war time agent? They are both characters with deep psychic motives, passions that run under the surface of their deceptively similar upper crust public school veneer.To be a fly on the wall of their meeting in Moscow last night was compelling.Yes we know what happened - but how and what were the all-important details? Did Philby feel guilty for the friends he’d sent to their deaths or the. young idealists he’d watched coolly as they parachuted off to certain capture by the all-too-well- informed MI6 agent - him.
At one stay in these revelatory exchanges Philby hits back at Greene? Wasn’t. he guilty too, the heartless novelist who plots savage ends to lives of characters? Wouldn’t he do the same? Intriguingly Kim Philby thought The Third Man was about him. It’s a conversation of a lifetime to listen into .
In A Splinter of Ice, on all this week, we witness two versions of Englishness;both men educated in the same perverse system of public school discipline, both in many ways reject their background - and both it is revealed have attempted suicide- Greene with his famous games of Russian roulette, Philby the quiet of Russian exile. Ben Brown’s complex play about their momentous meeting o in Moscow lets us explore both the principled creative genius of Graeme Greene, hidden under a cloak of muted gentlemanly decorum and Kim Philby cricket player, Cambridge man and ruthless dealer of death from behind his breathtakingly fake role in MI6. You will find yourself in the hands of a master dramatist who understands these two titans of modern times. Just how brilliant actors can conjure two personalities so perfectly is a surprise even after all these years.
A play as powerful as this cannot come easy. This playwright must be super proud of the tension he creates, the humour he infuses and ultimately the truth he tells about two people whose lives have been picked over by biographers for years.
Over the last 18 months I have watched Tom Cruise leap off roofs action movies and murder mysteries on a daily basis. But none of these made me experience the combination of affability and violence that Stephen Boxer and Oliver Ford Davis conjure on stage, the cold war cruelty familiar to both men is horribly real in the flesh. And unlike any film, it feels real. Karen Ascoe brings a feminine warmth to the play as Philby’s fourth wife a convincing depth yet the charming Englishman in Moscow entertaining though he is, has a Splinter of Ice. in his heart and no mistake.
`A brilliant Stephen Boxer is Kim Philby
