WHILE the lives and betrayals of upper-crust spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess are fascinating, their portrayal in Alan Bennett's Single Spies suggests that capturing the excitement of their lives on stage is harder than learning Russian.

Divided into two separate halves, An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution, the play shows a depressing slice of Burgess's life exiled in the USSR after role as a double agent was revealed to the world.

Clinging desperately to everything English, Burgess asks the visiting actress Coral Browne to measure him for some new suits and pass on his regards to his mother.

Perhaps appropriately Blunt's portrayal is much more intellectual, with Bennett making much use of the aloof spy's other career as an art historian, employed as the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, to make allegorical metaphors to fake works of art.

With Bennett's attention to the mundane and a rather sedentary Robert Powell as both men, the play brought by Theatre Royal Bath lacks the fizz needed to hold the attention to its high brow innuendo and historical facts.

The accomplished Liza Goddard, who is credible as Browne and uncannily good as the Queen, helps the audience by fully inhabiting her roles to offer relief from Powell's flat soliloquies.

Single Spies is showing at Malvern Theatres until tomorrow (Saturday, November 2).

Ally Hardy