Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: David Holmes, Kieran O’Rouke.
Your enemies are honest, for you know they hate you and wish to destroy your life bit by bit, your friends on the other hand can be a little more circumspect, a little less reliable for in them can live the seething, beating heart of jealousy and in one swift movement, a single action of a non returned hand can reveal their action against you.
If fashions go round in circles then the waves of paranoia that go with political machinations of opposite ideals and spectrums are like suspicions that sit and fester inside a washing machine, the spot of deception never once being erased away and as to the current destabilising rancour between East and West so to the period after the World War Two where in the West everybody and anybody, could have been part of The Communist Threat.
Whilst many will be familiar with the thought of Orson Welles performance in The Third Man, set against the backdrop of a Vienna just as much partitioned by the Allies as Berlin, the quiet business of spying, of fun and games of sides being swapped like badly made allegiances as one person leaves their family for the allure of the provocative Mata Hari on the basis of a quick fumble down a seedy alleyway, comes crashing down on the lives of two men and the question of what they hold dear becomes a matter between honour and death.
The two hander at Zoo Southside is wonderfully stifling, the air of oppression lingers in the nostrils and the wary, mist like suspicion of what you would betray your soul for nags at the heart; it is the nag of being born on one side and yet believing hand on heart in the ideals of the other.
The early morning slot is perhaps one that might be of concern to some productions but it adds a certain element of fission, of simmering energy in which the capturing of the Cold War’s bitter truth comes easily to the fore and to which both actors excel at portraying.
David Holmes and Kieran O’ Rouke play the parts of the British Secret Service men being tasked with the most sensitive of missions with absolute discretion and calmness, never once wavering under the pressure of what personal thoughts they might have on who is in the right and in the wrong, it is not a luxury offered the audience who are asked without fear, just how they would react to the order put before them.
A very enjoyable but also very relevant production which echoes the past superbly to the dangers facing the world today; does one stay loyal to the country of their birth or to the ideals they believe in? For The Communist Threat is just but one political idealism on trial today!
Ian D. Hall