A Morning With Guy Burgess

A year ago this drama by our Chairman John Morrison was read at P-P. Back then I was predicting great things of it, and so it has come to pass, as it's hitting the stage next week at the Courtyard Theatre, 40 Pitfield Street, Hoxton N1 6EU from January 11 to 30, with performances from Tuesday to Sunday at 7.30 pm. Tickets are £15 and £11 concessions from the Courtyard's website, or by telephone at 0844 477 1000. The theatre has free seating and the bar opens at 7 pm.

Pitfield Street is a five minute walk from Old Street on the Northern Line (take street exit 2 from the tube station). The theatre entrance is on Bowling Green Walk.

Here's some of the blurb:

‘Most people who come here adore the Russians but don’t like the system. I’m the other way round. I think the system is wonderful but the Russians drive me up the bloody wall.’

A summer’s morning, Moscow 1963. As the Soviet Union’s first woman cosmonaut is feted in Red Square, exiled spy Guy Burgess refills his glass and decides that twelve years in the socialist paradise is enough. His liver has reached the point of no return, his Soviet controllers have lost interest in him, and even the prospect of umpiring Donald Maclean’s cricket match no longer appeals. But his dreams of returning to his old haunts in London are interrupted by an unexpected visitor -- who also has a story to tell.....

Written by former Reuters foreign correspondent John Morrison, who was based in Moscow for several years during the 1970s and 1980s, A Morning with Guy Burgess paints a fresh picture of the outrageous life and times of the spy who never really wanted to defect at all, and asks wider questions about the nature of belief, loyalty and betrayal.

This premiere in the Courtyard Theatre’s Main House is directed by Georgian director Dimitry Devdariani ( and a P-P protege ), whose work in the UK includes The Gift by Eamon O'Donnell and Denise O'Leary's Pandora's Boxes in a radio broadcast on Resonance FM, as well as projects with Russian Theatre-studio Alkonost.