The red menace in Ruislip
Pack Of Lies (Menier Chocolate Factory)
Verdict: Dench’s daughter soars ★★★★★
THIRTY five years after Judi Dench created the part in the West end, her daughter Finty Williams plays Fifties housewife Barbara Jackson, who was deceived by Soviet spy Helen Kroger.
Hugh Whitemore’s Pack Of Lies is based on true events in blameless ruislip where Kroger and her husband Peter befriended their neighbours ( here called the Jacksons).
A Ford Consul outside the front door, tea cosy on the kitchentable pot, swirly carpet on the living-room floor and Anaglypta on the ceiling. We are deep in postwar suburbia.
Gushy Helen, allegedly Canadian, is forever dropping in on the Jacksons’ neat, lower middle- class home for tea and dress alterations and girly chats. She makes modest, honest Barbara feel liked and somehow skittish. Barbara’s teenage daughter Julie calls the Krogers ‘Auntie Helen and Uncle Peter’. Barbara and her cautious, decent husband Bob have never been so happy.
Yet all this time the Krogers, in reality American communists, are transmitting royal navy secrets to the KGB. One day Mi5 quietly visits the Jacksons and asks to use their top front room for surveillance purposes.
Brilliantly, the espionage has crossed the road. But Barbara finds it less easy than vivacious Helen to maintain the many petty betrayals needed in deception.
the play is not faultless — playwright Whitemore, who sadly died this summer, is pretty soft on the duplicitous Krogers — and this production at South London’s fringey Menier Chocolate Factory has a couple of minor shortcomings.
But March’s Salisbury poison attack lends the tale a fresh topicality. A line about how ‘the KGB don’t employ hooligans’ drew a knowing and rueful laugh from the audience.
And what a performance from Miss Williams. it may seem unfair to define her by her distinguished mother but you can tell her lineage: the poise, the birdlike glances, the clarity of voice.
DOESshe maybe have touches of imelda Staunton, too? But again, this is not fair. She is Finty Williams, a fine actress in her own right.
Alongside her is Chris Larkin’s Bob, both characters instinctively obedient to the British system. One telephone call to Scotland Yard assures them that Mi5 officer Mr Stewart ( the intensely watchable Jasper Britton) is genuine. Bob calls Stewart ‘sir’. they keep quiet about the surveillance operation on their great friends.
The Jacksons are ‘the kind of people who stand in queues and don’t ask questions and don’t answer back’. in that sense, the 20th century may have been an aberration but it is superbly captured here.
Tracy-ann Oberman’s Helen is blousily autumnal. Macy nyman is spot on as teenager Julie.
Everything unfolds on a detailed period set by Paul Farnsworth. Mind you, it worried me that the whisky bottle had no top.
The final moments capture the anguish of law- abiding folk who become mere chaff in geo- political rivalries. it is exquisitely done.