Behind the Scenes: Another Country
The Tab broke in for a quick spy to see how things were getting on at the Playhouse
Boarding school repression, Marxism, snobbery, suicide…
Screw the Looking Glass’ new adaption of Julian Mitchell’s award-winning play Another Country, set in an all-boys boarding school during the 1930s, promises to be a serious evening of theatre.
But despite the weighty script, the boys were more than ready to pull out their pouts for the Tab photographers when we went behind the scenes at the dress rehearsal on Monday.
In fact, they couldn’t get enough of the posing.
The play dramatises the schooldays of Guy Burgess, later part of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring who passed Western secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War.
Peter Huhne will be taking to the stage as Bennett (Burgess’s stage persona), with Jo Allan as Judd.
When first debuted in the 1980s, the play launched Kenneth Branagh, Daniel Day-Lewis, Rupert Everett and Colin Firth on the path to stardom.
The play opens on Wednesday night with a post-show Q&A with the playwright, Julian Mitchell.
Larking about on set, the boys proved their schoolboy humour by posing provocatively on chairs and snuggling up in the dormitory beds.
Strutting round in cricket whites the cast perfected their public school drawl before the opening show.
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Photos: Olivia Yallop and Rosie McBurney