The Burgess and Maclean story, from the very start, inspired novelists and dramatists. In 1954 Adam de Hegedus, a friend of Burgess writing under the pseudonym Rodney Garland, published The Troubled Midnight with the central character Eric Fontanet, who had been at Eton, the BBC and the Washington Embassy, a thinly disguised Burgess. The book is about the mysterious disappearance of two diplomats, narrated by a writer who had known them and was ‘able to investigate and interpret their political and emotional pasts from his own special knowledge’. It is full of the sort of insights into Burgess and his circle – Arthur Beaufort is Harold Nicolson, E.M. Forster is C.C. Gallen – which could only come from a close friend. ‘Fontanet seemed the type of youth who got away with things because of his personality, charm, good looks …’ and concludes with the confession that he, Eric, and his fellow spy Alan Lockheed ‘are far more valuable than an atomic scientist. We know all the methods of the Foreign Office and the State Department. All the joint plans of England and America. How their policy operates, what are the main points of friction between them. How to drive a wedge between them. Don’t you see, our worth is enormous. Science changes, strategy can be altered, but the methods of the Foreign Office must go on for ever.’1
Other novels about the pair have included Godfrey Smith’s The Flaw in the Crystal, Richard Llewellyn’s Mr Hamish Gleave, Smith and Jones by Burgess’s Trinity contemporary Nicholas Monsarrat, better known for The Cruel Sea, and Michael Dobbs’s Winston’s War, which takes as its starting point the encounter between Churchill and Burgess at Chartwell during the Munich Crisis.2 David Mure, who had known most of the members of the Cambridge Ring, wrote The Last Temptation, subtitled ‘a novel of treason’, which reworks Alice in Wonderland suggesting Guy Liddell was a spy, with Burgess as Duchess, Blunt as Red Queen and Philby as Red Knight.
In 1997 two novels appeared centring around Blunt, but in which Burgess made a strong appearance – John Banville’s The Untouchable and Rufus Gunn’s A Friendship of Convenience.3 Burgess has also figured in almost a hundred novels with a walk-on part ranging from Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred, in which a character Hector Dexter meets Burgess and Maclean in Russia – ‘When Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean first arrived we all shared a dacha. I cannot say it was a very happy association’ – to Terrance Dicks’s Doctor Who novel Endgame, which has the Doctor sharing a few drinks with Burgess at his Dacha in Moscow.4
In the 1970s Goronwy Rees, who had originally been commissioned by Chatto in 1959 to write a novel about Burgess, wrote a screenplay, Influence, which was never developed and intercuts events just before and after the flight in 1951, including Rees’s interrogations by MI5. The play begins in Dexter Linden’s flat in Bond Street, which he shares with an ex-dancer, Derek Morris. The walls are white, the paintwork blue, and the curtain and carpets red, and the bedroom ‘peopled with eighteenth-century dolls, battered most of them, and ragged’. He has just returned from America and visits Richard Owens (Rees) and tells him that he had nearly got married. ‘There was a nice girl I met. I say girl, she was forty. She was ready to marry me, then Phillips told her I was queer.’ Other scenes follow, with him meeting David Rooks (Maclean) at the Foreign Office with Mrs Denning (Mrs Bassett), where they discuss the girl Dexter almost married fifteen years earlier, culminating with Linden and Rooks looking back at Southampton from the decks of their boat bound for France, and a short epilogue that concludes, ‘Richard Owens, who lives in London, has received a visit from Her Majesty’s Secret Service every week for the past eighteen years. They are still not entirely satisfied with his story.’5
The visits to Rees by Burgess after his return from America, and then Blunt following the escape, is the subject of Robin Chapman’s play One of Us, first staged in February 1986 with Ian Ogilvy as Burgess and Anthony Andrews as Rees. Julian Mitchell’s play Another Country, staged in 1982 and filmed two years later, argues that the homosexual Guy Bennett’s sense of betrayal and rejection at school fuelled the resentment of authority which led to his recruitment.
Granada’s drama Philby, Burgess and Maclean (1977) with Derek Jacobi as Burgess, the BBC’s 1986 quasi-documentary drama Blunt with Ian Richardson as Blunt and Anthony Hopkins as Burgess, and the BBC television mini-series The Cambridge Spies (2003) with Tom Hollander as Burgess, maintained the interest. There was even a musical comedy, the Natural Theatre Company’s Spy Society or Burgess, Philby and Maclean (The Musical), in which ‘Bing Philby, Frank Burgess and Grace (or is it Shirley?) Maclean sing their greatest hits and give away all their secrets (and everyone else’s)’, and a play taking the form of the 1933 Cambridge Footlights revue The Iron Curtain Call.
Snoo Wilson’s 2004 Radio 3 play Hippomania, about John Betjeman in wartime Dublin, also features Guy Burgess, whilst Ernest Caballero’s radio play On the Rock, first produced in December 2009, is set at the Rock Hotel, Gibraltar, when Burgess brings Philby a new code. Burgess’s role as an intermediary for Joseph Ball and Neville Chamberlain is the subject of John Fletcher’s radio play Sea Change, first broadcast on Radio 3 at the beginning of 2012, and Michael Dobbs made the encounter with Churchill at Chartwell during the Munich Crisis a central part of his television play The Turning Point (2009), starring Benedict Cumberbatch. John Morrison’s play A Morning with Guy Burgess, first produced in January 2011, is set in 1963 and looks at the nature of belief, loyalty and betrayal after Burgess receives an unexpected visit.
The dramatist Alan Bennett heard the story of Burgess’s encounter with Coral Browne and felt it would make a television drama. An Englishman Abroad (1989), which is now paired with his 1988 play on Blunt, A Question of Attribution, as Single Spies, is perhaps the best-known depiction of Burgess.6