Cell Mates

Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London, 1961

One of Britain's most notorious double agents, George Blake, is serving a forty-two year sentence when he strikes up an unlikely friendship with Irish petty criminal, Sean Bourke

Both men are eccentric outsiders

Each sees in each other the possibility of escape and not just from prison

But once on the outside their mutual dependence faces mounting pressures from MI5, the KGB and indeed from themselves

Simon Gray's absorbing and deftly funny play explores how personal freedom is an illusion and how even friendship must have careful boundaries in a world where deception is a reflex response