New Play About Patrick McGoohan

UK theatrical outfit Tip Top Productions presents a new play about the life of Patrick McGoohan, Everyman.  Everyman plays one night only in Chester at the Forum Studio Theatre next Thursday, January 13 at 8PM. Tickets are just £6.00 and can be booked through the theater's website. Here's the official synopsis:

"EVERYMAN: The Story Of Patrick McGoohan - The Prisoner" is a new play detailing the life of the theatre, television, and film star (who sadly died last year). Writer Brian Gorman believes that a theatrical tribute to the star of such cult tv favourites as DANGER MAN and THE PRISONER is long overdue.

Thanks to sambullus on the Eurospy Forum for the tip on this.

Rachel Weisz, Bill Nighy, Michael Gambon Join David Hare Spy Movie

Possibly irked at being left out of the new film remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (which seems to star all of their peers), Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon have decided to make a high-brow spy movie of their own.  The Daily Mail's Baz Bamigboye reports that acclaimed playwright David Hare ("The Hours") has decided to try his hand at penning a spy movie.  And he's recruited first-rate actors to star in it.  Besides the great Nighy and Gambon (who once auditioned for the role of James Bond back in the Seventies), Oscar nominees (and former co-stars in John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener) Rachel Weisz and Ralf Fiennes will star in Hare's Page 8, which the writer will also direct.  According to the tabloid, "Bill Nighy will play an MI5 ­operative who believes [Weisz's] character could represent a threat to him. Michael Gambon will play the director general of the Security Service. Judy Davis, the celebrated ­Australian actress who rarely works outside her homeland, will also be in the film in an as yet unspecified role."  What's not totally clear from the article is whether this will be a theatrical film or one made for UK television.  BBC Films is producing (along with NBC Universal and Harry Potter mogul David Heyman), but BBC Films doesn't always mean TV; they've had plenty of theatrical releases.  I get the impression this is one of those. There's no question that the fantastic cast is film-caliber!

Bamigboye reveals some other intriguing details about Hare.  Apparently, the playwright (who previously penned the early Eighties Judi Dench spy film Saigon: Year of the Cat) is a spy fan, and wrote Page 8 basically because he saw a gap in bigscreen espionage entertainment and wanted to enhance his his own "pleasurable cinema-going." (He must have written it last year when there was a noticeable dearth of such movies in the theaters, as there've been a load of them this year.  But you can never have too many!)  Specifically, Hare misses James Bond (and who doesn't?), but it sounds like his own movie will, unsurprisingly, occupy more Le Carré territory.  And it just so happens that Hare and Le Carré are neighbors!  According to Bamigboye, "Hare revealed that Le Carré offered to read the Page 8 script, telling Hare: ‘I promise to be withering.’ Hare added: ‘That put me in my place. I wouldn’t dare give the screenplay to Le Carré. I’d be absolutely terrified to show him what I’ve come up with.’" Well, I, for one, am very curious to see what he's come up with!

Upcoming Spy DVDs: An Englishman Abroad And A Question Of Attribution

Hot on the heels of announcing MI-5: Volume 8, the BBC America Shop Blog has also announced Alan Bennett's Cambridge Spies teleplays "An Englishman Abroad" and "A Question of Attribution" for release on Region 1 DVD in early spring of next year.  "An Englishman Abroad," filmed for television in 1983 and directed by John Schlesinger, follows English actress Coral Browne (playing herself) on a cultural exchange in Moscow where she meets a mysterious Englishman.  He turns out to be exiled double agent Guy Burgess, one of the notorious Cambridge Spies.  Bennett's play reimagines the real conversations they had on all sorts of subjects, exploring Burgess' extreme homesickness and his motives for betraying his country.  Charles Grey also appears.  Bennett's fascination with the Cambridge spy ring continued in "A Question of Attribution" (1991), also directed by Schlesinger.  In that play, James Fox plays Sir Anthony Blunt, who served as Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures even after his private confession of espionage.  "A Question of Attribution" imagines a conversation between the spy and the Queen (Fawlty Towers' Prunella Scales). Geoffrey Palmer (Tomorrow Never Dies) also appears.  These two plays and eight others were released on R2 DVD in Britain as Alan Bennett at the BBC; the same collection will be released here as An Englishman Abroad - The Alan Bennett Collection. And of course this announcement comes right after I imported the UK version! D'oh.

Tradecraft: Christopher Marlowe, Spy

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Sam Riley (Control, Brighton Rock) has been tapped to play one of history's most famous celebrity spies--playwright Christopher Marlowe. Michael Elias has adapted Anthony Burgess' novel A Dead Man in Deptford for the screen, and Nick Copus (the Day of the Triffids remake) will direct. Almost-Saint James Purefoy will co-star, along with Ray Winstone (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Edge of Darkness), Ed Speleers (Eragon) and Adam Sinclair. Burgess is probably most famous for his novel A Clockwork Orange, though he also wrote an unused early draft for the Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, and later introduced some late-90s UK paperback editions of Ian Fleming's 007 novels. A Dead Man in Deptford, his final novel, reinforces his interest in spies.  According to the trade, "the movie will play with the idea that Marlowe, a notorious bar room brawler, was also a royal spy for Elizabeth I [a fairly widely-held idea, abely supported by Charles Nicholl in his Marlowe biography) and that his death in Deptford at age 29 may have been an assassination ordered by the English Secret Service." I've always been fascinated with the spy angle of Marlowe's career (and Elizabethan espionage in general), though I haven't read that novel.  I'm certainly excited for the movie, though!  Production is scheduled to begin in the spring.

Rupert Everett previously played Marlowe in a memorable cameo in Shakespeare in Love.