Alan Bennett is one of Britains premiere playwrights but his best material comes from the Seventies, before he took on the persona of a cosy, professional Yorkshireman.

The Old Country is part of a trilogy of spy plays, along with An Englishman Abroad and A Question Of Attribution. And while the latter two deal with the real spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, The Old Country introduces us to the fictional traitor Hilary and his long-suffering wife Bron, played here by Timothy West and Jean Marsh.

We first meet them in their shabby summer dacha outside Moscow where Hilary is trying to make a little piece of England, sitting in his rocking chair listening to Elgar, surrounded by piles of books and dreaming of home.

But this is a dream of home as it was when he first defected to the Soviet Union 15 years previously.

When his sister Veronica (Susan Tracy) pays a visit and details the changes in Britain, this is a catalyst for painful memories as he struggles with his love-hate relationship with the Old Country.

As Bennett points out in an updated programme note, exile is only made palatable by the thought everything at home has remained the same.

To anger Hilary more, his brother-inlaw Duff (Simon Williams) has a hidden agenda to persuade the traitor to return to England where, after what he promises will be a short prison sentence, he will be hailed as a celebrity.

This is a masterly play and Timothy West gives a towering performance as the elderly man trying to redeem himself and what he has done.

West appears to make some slips with the script but is adept at recovering himself and is mesmerising to watch. Why, I wonder though, has this play been revived? You probably have to be 50 or over to understand all the references and in this first decade of the 20th Century the nature of treachery has changed.

I could certainly admire the likes of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, who betrayed Britain for ideas. Nowadays, treachery is setting off a bomb on a tube train and no one can admire that.

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