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The Cold Light is indicative of producer Rudolph Cartier's desire to
supplement the conventional, inoffensive television repertoire of the 1950s with
more challenging contemporary European material. The play was the second of four
by popular German dramatist Carl Zuckmayer that Cartier would produce for the
BBC. Cartier had travelled to Hamburg in 1955 for the German premiere of The
Cold Light and persuaded Zuckmayer to allow him to give the play its British
premiere on television.
Zuckmayer's story is a fictional take on the then recent case of Klaus Fuchs,
a German physicist who in 1950 had been imprisoned for passing atomic secrets to
the Soviet Union while working in British and American research establishments
in the 1940s. The play's central character, Crystof Wolters, is similarly
placed. Zuckmayer portrays him sensitively throughout, depicting the
circumstances that led to his treachery. In Zuckmayer's hands, the story becomes
not a conventional spy drama but an exploration of loyalty, treachery and the
politics of science.
The German Wolters is initially British by allegiance, having fled the Nazis,
and in the play's opening scene espouses the very British sentiment that it
'couldn't happen here'. Soon, however, he is interned as an 'enemy alien' and
sent to Canada. It is the privations he and his fellow internees experience on
the voyage (notably the death of the Jewish ex-concentration camp inmate
Friedlaender), which turns Wolters to socialistic sympathies and condemnation of
the 'decadent' Western nations. Although not a communist himself, the idealistic
words of a Communist Party man turn his thoughts to the most humanitarian
distribution of research secrets.
The play's espionage plot is supplemented by a love story, with Wolters
discovering that his Norwegian sweetheart Hjoerdis has married during his
internment. He finds he must work under her husband, the bullish and
militaristic Kettering, who leads the atomic research project. In one of the
play's most effective scenes, Wolters must forsake Hjoerdis, now prepared to
leave Kettering, or explain that a note that she believes to arrange a meting
with another woman does in fact refer to his spying.
Marius Goring, in the second of numerous performances for Cartier, carries
the bulk of the play on his shoulders. He imbues Wolters with an inner torment
and the quietly expressed moral turmoil of his position. The Times observed that
Goring "gave the part compelling intellectual continuity, and moments in his
performance were profoundly disturbing".
Oliver Wake
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1. Friedlander's death (5:08)
