An Englishman Abroad (1983)

Essential Viewing

UK

Television Film

Director: John Schlesinger

Writer: Alan Bennett

Cinematographer: Nat Crosby

Composer: George Fenton

Cast: Alan Bates, Coral Browne, Denys Hawthorne, Trevor Baxter, Roger Hammond

Coral Browne (played by herself), in Moscow performing Hamlet in 1958, spends an afternoon in the decidedly grotty flat of the infamous traitor Guy Burgess (Bates, wonderful) – a member of The Cambridge Five spy ring, who had defected to the USSR in 1951 – making promises to visit his old tailor on her return to London with instructions for a new set of suits, in Bennett’s hilarious, pathos-laden, and terribly human dramatisation of an actual (decidedly bizarre) encounter. Iain.Stott