Another Country Review: Discussing Espionage and This Queer Drama’s Relationship to British Public School

By Lexi Dykes

One Saturday night, a group of five of us quite randomly decided to watch Another Country, the 1984 film directed by Marek Kanievska and adapted from the 1981 play by Julian Mitchell. It’s a quasi-political, romantic period drama set in a 1930s British all-boys public school, the likes of Eton, Winchester and Harrow. A personal fan of depressing romantic films with an academia aesthetic, this had been on my watchlist as something I thought might be like Maurice by E. M. Forster.

A British man (poorly aged with makeup and a dodgy wig) gives an interview in present-day Moscow. He intends to explain how he came to side with “Another Country”, having been exposed as a Soviet spy. Following this, the film is structured as a flashback that illustrates this man, Guy Bennett, explaining how his boarding school experience was entirely responsible for his “betrayal” of Britain. Bennett is played by a pretty dishy young Rupert Everett and based loosely on Guy Burgess; clearly there are contextual parallels to the public school and university education of the Cambridge Five spy ring. If you don’t know much about the Cambridge Five, it is a fascinating British espionage scandal stretching from the 1930s to the 1980s involving figures like Anthony Blunt, the famous art-historian who was Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures before he was exposed as a Soviet agent and had his knighthood removed. What Another Country explores, is how this particular kind of school’s culture of disclosure, oppression, and total lack of privacy cultivates treachery and subsequent behaviours of discretion, making it a credible framework to investigate both espionage and homosexuality.

IMDb. Rupert Everett as Guy Bennett in the film’s opening scene.

However, Another Country achieves a better and clearer link with the latter. We don’t see the aged Bennett again until the end and so this bookended interview falls a little flat. His turn to Soviet intelligence is hardly discussed or explicitly explained, but wholly implied through the film’s exploration of his sexuality at school. Indeed, when writing the play, Mitchell recognised that the majority of these British Soviet spies involved in the contemporary scandal were gay. The dramatic tension that opens the film comes from a student’s suicide after being caught having sex with another boy by a master. We then follow the love-struck and openly gay Bennett’s doomed pursuit of another sweet boy named Harcourt. Bennett is friends with the principled Judd (played brilliantly by a baby-faced Colin Firth) who is a committed communist attending the school against his values. Anyway, what we gathered from the get-go, is that Another Country would provide political and class commentary through the dramaturgy of this school in scandal. What I don’t believe is clearly communicated—and that I hope is fleshed out in the play which I intend to read this week—is that some parents are threatening to pull their children out. It is the students’ own fear and recognition of scandal reaching their parents and the world beyond, that allows the film to imply that these teenagers have suddenly, and perhaps for the first time, become acutely aware of their class and early 20th-century societal expectations. This fear drives most of the film’s action: the prefects, Fowler in particular, crack down on “misbehaviour” and aim to make boarding houses “clean” by enforcing repression, draconian punishment, and a culture of shame.

IMDb. Students playing cricket.

The film’s greatest asset is how it displays the school’s hierarchy with positions of responsibility (prefects, heads of houses and senior ‘Gods’ before masters) like the pyramid of the Capitalist system. The younger boys are very overtly shown doing no schoolwork but hard work, shining shoes or silver, doing laundry or tasks at the orders of the senior boys who yield this “political” power over them but sit around and play cricket. They depressingly accept their orders, under the impression they will assume this privilege in senior years, and then uphold the system as adults, something Firth’s Judd has some great dialogue on. His dissent towards the school and his peers creates a substantial deal of pressure, profound speech, and drama. Judd’s refusal to become a prefect and engage in the school’s oppressive system is the most fascinating part, which goes against his moral urge to eliminate the tyrannical Fowler and save his friend Bennett from cruelty.

IMDb. Bennett and Judd (Colin Firth), strolling around the cricket field watching the game.

It's structurally clever, that the master who appears at the beginning of the film catching the two students, is the only appearance of any adult in this environment. With this, we said the film has a great Lord of the Flies-esque quality, where teenage boys are role-playing the adults of authority they think they already are, asserting power or preventing others from gaining it. Spoiler alert ahead: Bennett’s sacrifice to save Harcourt from exposure (instead of blackmailing the prefects by threatening to reveal their own gay affairs), is depressing and wrong as he endures corporeal punishment, rendered absurd as it is carried out by students, who also stand by and watch. Much of the prefects’ and heads of houses’ behaviour has a distinctly military feel. Set in the inter-war period, the opening scene’s Remembrance Service very subtly suggests the First World War’s impact on this generation. I imagine that the film’s fascination with positions of responsibility implies these boys unconsciously assume the role of their fathers, who would most likely have died for the country. Although we find out Bennett’s father died of a heart attack, this would have made his national spy-betrayal an even more interesting turn on everything from the nation, class and public school system to his family.

 IMDb. Bennett purposely failing inspection to the prefects’ dismay.

I’m not going to explain the whole film or every detail of the plot as it’s more interesting to just watch it. It’s quite character-driven to its benefit, and Everett and Firth’s duologues with each other in particular are naturalistic, emotional and very well written and performed. There are delicate and deliberate visual details such as Oxford University quads for most of the exterior scenes, wonderful costume design, and very apt and ironic choices of music like I Vow to Thee My Country. Yet I don’t doubt that the play is probably a million times more effective. I hope the dialogue will be more satisfactory and the action clearer. I imagine the boys’ relationships will be rendered more intense, making themes of betrayal, romance and friendship resonate stronger. It must have lent itself to impressive performances - I didn’t realise the play’s nineteen-month run at Greenwich Playhouse and then at the West End had launched the careers of many successful actors including Everett, Firth, Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Day-Lewis.

IMDb. Bennett and Harcourt pursuing their romance in secret one night.

It was interesting to watch as the only Brit of the five of us, and as someone who attended an all-girls boarding school. Quite strange when they asked me if my school had prefects and then admitting I had been one, as well as when I found myself knowing all the words to Hubert Parry’s I Was Glad which played for a whole scene. Much of the film is unsurprisingly niche and at times inaccessible, cricket, hymns, and some jargon especially, and I took for granted for understanding quite naturally compared to my friends who had never encountered these. I was surprised to read that, according to Mitchell, The Royal Court was too hesitant to put this play on when it was pitched, as I’m aware it is a theatre that claims to ‘embrace diversity, dissent, risk and ambition.’ This film is not diverse, but I can imagine forty-odd years ago it was pretty risky and ambitious for an audience it basically depicts, freely discussing youth and homosexuality, being critical of the upper-class, societal expectations and British public schools, as well as exposing problems with corporeal punishment in education. And of course, the drama would have been particularly charged at the time with the relevance of the British espionage scandal. I had never considered boarding schools’ obvious relationship to spying before watching Another Country. 24/7 exposure to your peers and a lack of privacy so obviously lends itself to gossip, betrayal, and secrecy. I don’t know any friends who have gone on to, or who are intending to work in national intelligence or betray it, but then again, how would I know?