MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
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Unfinished business
Simon Gray's play on Soviet double agent George Blake is disappointingly incomplete, says LYNNE WALSH
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
Cell Mates
Hampstead Theatre, London
HERE'S a jigsaw piece in the story of 95-year-old former MI6 officer George Blake, now living in a dacha close to Moscow, who recently gave interviews saying that he held fast to his communist beliefs and remained optimistic.
Double agent Blake, sentenced five years earlier to 42 years in prison, was helped in his “comic-book” escape from Wormwood Scrubs to the Soviet Union in 1966 by petty criminal Sean Bourke.
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