 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
|
The Dog It Was That Died is a play by the British playwright Tom Stoppard.
Written for BBC Radio in 1982, it concerns the dilemma faced by a spy over who he actually works for. The play was also adapted for television by Stoppard, and broadcast in 1988. The title is taken from Oliver Goldsmith's poem "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog".
Rupert Purvis works for "Q6", a department of an unnamed espionage agency of the British Government. As the play begins, he is in the process of ending his life by jumping off Waterloo Bridge into the Thames. However, the attempt goes wrong when he falls not into the water but onto a passing barge, breaking his legs and killing a dog which was on the deck.
Over the course of the play, the reasons for this emerge. Some years ago, Purvis was approached by a Soviet spy named Rashnikov, who asked him to work as a double agent. Purvis reported this to his British superiors, who told him to pretend to work as a Soviet double agent whilst really working for them. However, Purvis also recalls that Rashnikov had told him to tell his British masters that he was being recruited, effectively setting up a double bluff ahead of time. Purvis also told this to the British – but is worried that when he did so, it was again because Rashnikov told him to do so. The upshot is that the British and the Russians have been using Purvis to shuttle false information between each other; but to allay the other side's suspicions, each has been giving real information to the other as well.
The result of this is that Purvis is no longer sure who his employer is – is he really working for the Russians or the British? Purvis's manager Giles Blair visits Purvis at Clifftops, a rest home on the Norfolk coast which is maintained by the agency for former spies who have suffered breakdowns. In the process of finding Purvis, Blair encounters not one but two inmates, both of whom pose as medical staff. The result is that when he finally meets the real administrator, Doctor Seddon, he is highly suspicious, and when Seddon tries to interest him in the guano he has found from a colony of bats in the bell tower (Blair: "Bats? In the belfry?!" Seddon: "Mmm. Had 'em for years and never realised."), he makes hasty excuses and runs away, bumping into Purvis as he does so.
They discuss Purvis's problem, and Blair, in the course of attempting to make Purvis feel better, inadvertently shows him that his entire life has been pointless. Purvis is actually greatly calmed by this, and he and Blair part on good terms. The next scene opens at Purvis's memorial service – he has succeeded in committing suicide by rolling his wheelchair off a cliff at the rest home. Blair ponders: "One asks oneself, with the benefit of hindsight, was Clifftops the ideal place to send someone with a tendency to fling themselves from a great height to a watery grave? Of course at the time one didn't realise it was a tendency..."
In the closing scene, the whole structure is explained by the agency's unnamed chief, although even this explanation remains dizzyingly complex. The chief sums up by saying, "Purvis was acting as a genuine Russian spy to preserve his cover as a bogus Russian spy. In other words, if Purvis's mother had been kicked by a donkey, things would be very much as they are. If I were Purvis I'd drown myself."
In a second suicide note delivered to Blair after his memorial service, Purvis explains that whatever side he was really on, at the end he decided he felt more sympathy for the British side and is almost convinced that they were in fact his employers. He concludes: "I hope I'm right. Although I would settle for knowing that I'm wrong." He also adds that he has learned that Rashnikov was recalled to the Soviet Union on suspicion of having been duped by the British. "Rashnikov said there was a perfectly good reason why this should have been the impression given; but unfortunately he died of a brainstorm while trying to work it out. You could say that the same thing happened to me."
Giles Blair, Purvis's boss at Q6; sophisticated and worldly, he has none of Purvis's internal doubts and so has great difficulty grasping the crux of Purvis's dilemma. 'I never really got beyond us being British and them being atheists and communists. You can't argue with that so I think I rather switched off after that point... ...All you've got to do is remember what you believe.'
Blair represents the quintessential upper-class English bureaucrat; there is nothing of the glamour of James Bond about him. Despite being perhaps the central character of the play – certainly he has the most lines – he remains a somewhat ineffectual figure, happy to allow events to follow their course. Blair collects clocks – his house is full of them – and is also constructing a folly in the grounds of his house.
Rupert Purvis, a tortured soul. Purvis is highly principled, which makes it all the more upsetting for him when he can't recall exactly what those principles are.
Hogbin, described by Blair as a 'policeman' but actually another spy, Hogbin is assigned to investigate the circumstances of Purvis's suicide attempt, and in particular a letter he posted to Blair before his first attempt. Hogbin is the polar opposite of Blair – doggedly determined, prone to panic and seeing conspiracies at every turn.
Pamela Blair, wife of Giles. She runs a donkey sanctuary, occasionally appropriating her husband's study as an operating theatre for her injured charges. She is having an affair with Blair's boss; a fact about which both she and Blair are entirely open and unconcerned.
The Dog It Was That Died has been described as Stoppard's 'le Carrécture', and it takes much of its mannered approach from John le Carré's work. The play takes place against a background of Cold War paranoia, and at the time of its first production it was quite believable that such complex shenanigans could take place. It is full of Stoppard's usual verbal pyrotechnics, particularly in those scenes where the full details of Purvis's career are being explored.
The characters of Blair and Purvis are contrasted skilfully – one the benignly complacent bureaucrat, the other a deeply principled fighter for his beliefs. There is also a class contrast between Blair and Hogbin; whilst the agencies involved are never specifically stated, their respective characters conform exactly to the period's stereotypes of MI6 and MI5 officers, as Blair is very much the upper-class and somewhat louche eccentric and Hogbin the conscientious if unimaginative middle-class moralist. However, in the end Blair proves to be more in control of the situation than Hogbin.
The play also explores eccentricity in general in a fond way. Virtually all the characters in it have a pronounced eccentricity of some kind: Blair's clocks and his folly; his wife's donkey sanctuary and casual affair with her husband's superior; the chief's regular smoking of opium; the obsession with rare cheese of the vicar who carries out Purvis's memorial; and Seddon's fascination with guano. Additionally, Blair and Purvis's former boss, "Jell", apparently used to wear hunting pink to the office. Purvis's second suicide note makes this delight in the gentle eccentricities of his countrymen explicit, describing English eccentricity as "a curious bloom, which here at Clifftops only appears in its overblown variety".
The title of the play comes from Oliver Goldsmith's poem "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" which ends:
In some ways Purvis may be seen as the mad dog of the poem.
Stoppard may have borrowed the idea to use this quotation from British novelist W. Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel The Painted Veil , in which the protagonist's husband, bitter at her infidelity, takes her to cholera-stricken China in hopes that she will take ill and die. When he catches cholera instead, he dies with the quotation "The dog it was that died" on his lips.
The words also occur in a speech by Wormold, the lead character in Graham Greene's 1958 novel Our Man in Havana – also an entertaining tale of Cold War espionage. ("I have come back", he said to Beatrice, "I am not under the table. I have come back victorious. The dog it was that died.")
First produced 1982 on BBC Radio 4. The cast was:
The play was transferred to television in 1989 by Channel 4. The director was Peter Wood. The cast was:
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Thomas Gray was an English poet, letter-writer, and classical scholar at Cambridge University, being a fellow first of Peterhouse then of Pembroke College. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751.
Oliver Goldsmith was an Anglo-Irish writer best known for his works The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), The Good-Natur'd Man (1768), The Deserted Village (1770) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771). He is thought by some to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765).
Maelgwn Gwynedd was King of Gwynedd during the early 6th century. Surviving records suggest he held a pre-eminent position among the Brythonic kings in Wales and their allies in the "Old North" along the Scottish coast. Maelgwn was a generous supporter of Christianity, funding the foundation of churches throughout Wales and even far beyond the bounds of his own kingdom. Nonetheless, his principal legacy today is the scathing account of his behavior recorded in De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae by Gildas, who considered Maelgwn a usurper and reprobate. The son of Cadwallon Lawhir ap Einion and great-grandson of Cunedda, Maelgwn was buried on Ynys Seiriol, off the eastern tip of Anglesey, having died of the "yellow plague"; quite probably the arrival of Plague of Justinian in Britain.
David John Moore Cornwell, better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen.
The "Town Musicians of Bremen" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimms' Fairy Tales in 1819.
Rupert James Hector Everett is a British actor. He first came to public attention in 1981 when he was cast in Julian Mitchell's play and subsequent film Another Country (1984) as a gay pupil at an English public school in the 1930s; the role earned him his first BAFTA Award nomination. He received a second BAFTA nomination and his first Golden Globe Award nomination for his role in My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), followed by a second Golden Globe nomination for An Ideal Husband (1999). He voiced Prince Charming in two Shrek films: Shrek 2 (2004) and Shrek the Third (2007). He also played John Lamont/Mr. Barron in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016).
Dinsdale James Landen was an English actor. His television appearances included starring in the shows Devenish (1977) and Pig in the Middle (1980). The Independent named him an "outstanding actor with the qualities of a true farceur". He performed in many Shakespeare plays at Stratford-upon-Avon and Regent's Park Open Air Theatre.
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess was a British diplomat and Soviet double agent, and a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.
Lady Annabel Goldsmith is an English socialite and the eponym for a London nightclub of the late 20th century, Annabel's. She was first married for two decades to entrepreneur Mark Birley, the creator of Annabel's. Annabel's was her husband's inaugural members-only Mayfair club.
Rufus Frederik Sewell is a British actor. In film, he has appeared in Carrington (1995), Hamlet (1996), Dangerous Beauty (1998), Dark City (1998), A Knight's Tale (2001), The Legend of Zorro (2005), The Illusionist (2006), Amazing Grace (2006), The Holiday (2006), The Tourist (2010), Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), Judy (2019), The Father (2020), and Old (2021).
Rupert William Anthony Friend is an English actor. He first gained recognition for his roles in The Libertine (2004) and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), both of which won him awards for best newcomer. He portrayed George Wickham in Pride & Prejudice (2005), Lieutenant Kurt Kotler in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), Albert, Prince Consort in The Young Victoria (2009), psychologist Oliver Baumer in Starred Up (2013), CIA operative Peter Quinn in the political thriller series Homeland (2012–2017), Vasily Stalin in The Death of Stalin (2017), Theo van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate (2018), and Ernest Donovan in the series Strange Angel (2018–2019).
Dillinger is a 1973 American biographical gangster film, dramatizing the life and criminal exploits of notorious bank robber John Dillinger. It is written and directed by John Milius in his feature directorial debut, and stars Warren Oates as Dillinger, Ben Johnson as FBI Agent Melvin Purvis, and Michelle Phillips in her first film performance as Dillinger's moll Billie Frechette. Other actors in the film include Cloris Leachman, Harry Dean Stanton, and Richard Dreyfuss.
Mad Dog is the name of four fictional characters in the DC Comics universe. Two of them are associated with Batman.
Giles Stannus Cooper, OBE was an Anglo-Irish playwright and prolific radio dramatist, writing over sixty scripts for BBC Radio and television. He was awarded the OBE in 1960 for "Services to Broadcasting". A dozen years after his death at only 48 the Giles Cooper Awards for Radio Drama were instituted in his honour, jointly by the BBC and the publishers Eyre Methuen.
The Russia House is a 1990 American spy film directed by Fred Schepisi and starring Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer, Roy Scheider, James Fox, John Mahoney, Klaus Maria Brandauer and director Ken Russell. Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay based on John le Carré's 1989 novel of the same name. It was the first US motion picture to be shot substantially on location in the Soviet Union.
Boy was a white hunting poodle belonging to Prince Rupert of the Rhine in the 17th century. Parliamentarian propaganda alleged that the dog was "endowed" with magical powers.
The Field is a 1990 Irish drama film written and directed by Jim Sheridan and starring Richard Harris, John Hurt, Sean Bean, Brenda Fricker and Tom Berenger. It was adapted from John B. Keane's 1965 play of the same name. The film is set in the early 1930s and was shot almost entirely in the Connemara village of Leenaun.
A Delicate Truth is a 2013 spy novel by British writer John le Carré. Set in 2008 and 2011, the book features a British/American covert mission in Gibraltar and the subsequent consequences for two British civil servants.
