Spies, Connaught Theatre, Worthing, until March 8

6:00am Thursday 6th March 2008

"I'd read the book and loved it," director Nikki Sved explains of Theatre Alibi's decision to adapt Michael Frayn's Spies for the stage.

"It's a mixture of an exciting mystery and also a very lovely examination of what it is to be a child, and how it is to remember your younger self as well."

Set during both the Second World War and the present day, Frayn's 2002 novel follows narrator Stephen Wheatley, who, as an old man returning to the scene of his seemingly ordinary Surrey boyhood, unfolds a story of childish games colliding cruelly with adult realities.

It is a story rich with dramatic potential and one of Frayn's most popular works, so it made sense for Alibi - the Exeter-based touring theatre company with a reputation for inventive storytelling - to jump on it.

Adaptations, though, are always daunting, especially when the writer you're adapting is also a playwright. Alibi only decided to take the risk because the company's theatrical style is so different to that of Frayn's, whose CV includes the award-winning historical drama Copenhagen and the farce Noises Off.

Sved adds: "In a way it was very lovely having a book, because you get all of the subtext. If you have a play you just get the surface words.

"I definitely had a sense of Frayn on my shoulders during rehearsals and it's been a kind of guiding light."

But Alibi's Spies is, Sved says, very different to the book, both tonally and in its pace.

"You have to think of it differently" she says. "We wanted to be true to the novel without being slavish in a way that isn't true to theatre.

"We've had a lot of people in who have read the book and they have been lovely about it, so one assumes they're taking it in a slightly different way and getting different things from it."

A cast of just six actors play all the parts - "partly to do with having a solid ensemble, partly to do with us being a storytelling company" - and Alibi chose to have a young and old Stephen on stage throughout, to show the disparity - and at times similarity - in how they experience the events of the novel.

Music is also used significantly. Composed during rehearsals, it ties in closely with what it happening on stage, with certain speeches set to music.

Sved says: "Our composer chose to work with the accordion and the cello, partly because the cello is so full of feeling and the story is very full of melancholy and longing. The accordion is very period-specific and good for powering moments of mystery."

Many of the Spies cast also appeared in Alibi's previous work, Caught, a play about the 1969 theft of Caravaggio's painting The Palermo Nativity, which toured nationally last year.

Though the subject matter of Spies is very different, Sved says: "What I hope is that one is led very particularly by the material and as a company I hope we always bow to the story itself. That is what leads us."

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