Kompromat

The VAULTS Festival, 23rd Jan - 3rd Feb

It’s our second visit to this years VAULTS festival. It’s also the second two hander and the second play we're seeing based on real events, albeit a very different proposition to Christopher Adams and Timothy Allsop’s OPEN. Whilst that presented both an hilarious and touching insight into the highs and lows of an open relationship, we now find ourselves thrust into the much murkier world of double agents and assassinations all played out against a fatal quest for love in David Thame’s new play Kompromat. Such is the beauty and diversity of theatre.

Kompromat is a Russian word to describe the collection of compromising information for the use of blackmail, or to discredit or manipulate someone, typically for political purpose, and such is the backdrop for Thame’s play based on the 2010 murder of GCHQ agent Gareth Williams who was found dead at a security service safe house in Pimlico on 23rd August 2010. It became widely reported as the ‘Spy In The Bag’ case, given Williams naked body was found in a large sports bag, padlocked from the outside, that had been placed in the bath of his own apartment.

Despite the murder remaining unsolved, (although new evidence in 2015 suggests Williams was murdered by Russian hit men when he refused to become a double agent) there is more than enough mystery and controversy surrounding his death for Thame to craft this gripping erotic thriller. Williams was an intensely private man who was alleged to have frequented gay nightclubs, enjoyed cross-dressing, (£20,000 worth of woman clothes and a red wig being found at his apartment), and had been discovered to have visited fetish websites. He was also an intelligent, skilled mathematician who started work as an analyst for GCHQ in 2001. At the scene of his death there was no weapon, no sign of forced entry and no sign of a struggle. Thame skilfully amalgamates all of this information into a highly credible sequence of events whilst managing to keep the tension at a high level throughout. No mean feat given most of the audience will have already been aware of this stories outcome.

Whilst in the play the fate of the fictional Tom (Guy Warren-Thomas) is consigned to the same fate as the real life Gareth Williams on who he is based, it is Zac’s (Max Rinehart) less clearly defined fate as his killer that adds a second, equally compellingly dimension to the play.  Rinehart plays Zac beautifully with a convincing laddish yet nervous energy as the drama slips effortlessly back and forth between a pre-murder and post-murder timeline, periodically breaking the third wall to address to the audience throughout. It’s a device that works well, and is kept under perfect control by director Peter Darney. Both Max Rinehart and Guy Warren-Thomas do excellent jobs with Thame’s script, and under Darney’s assured direction both characters are brought convincingly to life, although whilst Tom is given all the mannerisms of a somewhat socially awkward geek, when Warren-Thomas reveals his gym fit muscular frame it was not exactly the body I was imagining a GCHQ analyst to have. 

Having only just met Zac, and already noticing inconsistencies in the stories he is being told, Tom is ultimately powerless to let his more rational, analytical head seize back control from his heart’s loneliness making his journey all the more uncomfortable to watch, especially when we see this awkward, nerdy computer geek find the inner confidence to momentarily dominate the situation with the revelation of his fetish for dressing up in women’s clothing. Whilst this provided a memorable moment where Tom’s strong yet vulnerable lingerie clad body is silhouetted against his large apartment window in this simple yet effective set. It’s a moment I felt somewhat robbed of it’s full potential, given it was already a scene slightly out of kilter with the rest of the play by dint of it being one of the few scenes to be accompanied by music, and could have benefitted from some slightly bolder direction to realise it's full potential. A small point that is no doubt just the photographer in me fixating on a single visual moment in an otherwise gripping drama.

Whilst Zac knows he has been left with no other option than to murder Tom, (no spoiler alert required given the story it is based on) for all his wide-boy bravado Rinehart manages to inject his character with enough vulnerability of his own as to not completely alienate him from the audience. With just enough information about his shady world as a sex worker, spy and now assassin, he still exhibits a nativity about the world in which he has long since lost himself, and we realise there is every possibility things might not turn out much better for him in the long-run. Zac’s confident exterior belies how little control he also has in his own destiny, it feeling ultimately as though neither of the two men are truly the guardians of their own future, and when Zac describes Tom as being “brave but absolutely clueless’ it’s hard not to apply the same words when thinking about Zac himself. A play well deserving of its extended run.

★★★★