Another Country – reviews of 'compelling' schooldays drama

Revival of Mitchell drama about the boyhood of a Cambridge spy is 'funny, painful and relevant', say critics

Will Attenborough and Rob Callender
(Image credit: Johan Persson)

What you need to knowA revival of Julian Mitchell's Another Country has opened at Trafalgar Studios, London. Mitchell's 1981 play, inspired by the unmasking of the Cambridge-educated Soviet spy ring, was turned into a 1984 film that helped launch the careers of Rupert Everett and Colin Firth.

The play is a fictionalised account of the schooldays of Soviet spy Guy Burgess and communist John Cornford. It follows Guy Bennett and Tommy Judd, two public school outsiders in 1930s England, one homosexual, the other a Marxist. When scandal strikes the school, the young men must decide what they stand for and make choices that will affect their lives and their country forever.

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