AN Englishman Abroad and A Question Of Attribution, the Single Spies plays, have become as much a coupling as salt and pepper, chalk and cheese.

The 20th anniversary of An Englishman Abroad is a sound a reason to revive the Cambridge Spy ring dramas, but as good plays are wont to do they will always reflect the present as well as their own times, in this case 1958 and the late 1960s.

The last Yorkshire production, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in spring 2000, coincided with devolution for the Scots and Welsh leading to the English questioning their own patriotism and the essence of the Englishman, just as Guy Burgess and Sir Anthony Blunt do - and so too Bennett.

This time, the Cambridge Spies series on BBC2 has given the old traitors new topicality and now the Hutton Inquiry into Dr David Kelly's death has spotlighted once more the treacherous behaviour of the English in high places.

In these witty and cryptic plays on espionage, the English and exile, the neatly creased wit of Bennett is matched by the crisp direction of Tim Welton. In the theatre boxes, he places red material, back lit to reveal suits in An Englishman Abroad; classical paintings in A Question Of Attribution. At the start, a red sheet, lit with the Soviet hammer-and-sickle insignia, is whisked away with a magician's flourish to reveal the dishevelled Moscow flat of defector Guy Burgess.

There is a flourish about the gregarious Burgess too, undimmed by years of exile, still charming, bright, sartorial and defiant, as realised with flamboyance by Stuart Organ. Yet the hollowed Burgess is playing to an audience of only one, the Australian touring actress Coral Browne (Christine Cox), whom he has asked to order a suit from his usual London tailor. You sense a half-life in the half-light, still craving the spotlight.

Where Burgess is bold and cocky, Blunt is cold, formal, unemotional and distant. In Bennett's second series of stop-start vignettes built around a strange encounter, Gregory Floy's elegantly evasive Blunt is a man of the shadows. In his (imaginary) Palace corridor meeting with The Queen (Cox again, with spot-on accent and mannerisms), each masks their real meaning in a conversation of oh-so-English manners.

We shall never completely unravel why the quintessentially English Burgess and Blunt betrayed their country, and Bennett's plays smile with anarchic glee at the covert and overt English in a twist.

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Updated: 14:44 Wednesday, September 24, 2003