In the cinema, spy cases are a mine of fear or hilarity depending on whether it is a dramatic film or a comedy. But if a dramatic film can do without hilarity, on the other hand, a comedy cannot do without this fear that we call suspense. Demonstration with the British mini-series Stonehouse: MP, lover and spybroadcast on Arte, with, in the title role, Matthew Macfadyen (who was the unforgettable son-in-law of Logan Roy, aka Rupert Murdoch, in the series Succession).
It’s all based on a true story (yay!). John Stonehouse really existed and he was indeed an MP, a spy and an adulterous husband. Born in 1925, elected MP for Wednesbury (England) from 1957 to 1976, with an interlude from July 1968 to June 1970 during which he held the post of Postmaster General, a portfolio that seems to have come out of a Feydeau play.
Cowardly, stupid…and hilarious
Stonehouse started working for the Czechoslovak secret service as early as the year 1962, when he was at the Ministry of Aviation. He receives enough money from the communists to invest in fraudulent, clumsy and increasingly visible financial schemes. On the verge of being discovered, he found nothing better than to disappear on November 20, 1974, leaving behind a wife, two children and a Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in trouble. To his cowardice he adds the stupidity of staging his death by drowning near Miami. Declared dead, supposedly devoured by sharks, he was arrested by the police on the following December 24, in New Zealand, where he squandered the fruits of his schemes in the company of his parliamentary attaché and mistress, Sheila Buckley.
In England, where he was extradited and imprisoned, the affair caused a scandal. His trial resulted in a sentence of several months in prison. He died of a heart attack in 1988. It was only twenty-two years after his death that his spy activities were revealed to the public, MI5 having preferred to remain discreet about this monumental fiasco. It really bothers her that a Minister of Her Majesty could be a spy in the pay of Moscow. How can we imagine that Soviet paranoia could go so far as to invest in such an insignificant character?
It is on this absurdity that the scenario of the series is based (three episodes only!): we constantly switch from the real to the improbable, from compassion for the wife and children of this Stonehouse to the hilarity that inspires us his lame schemes.
Prototype of the evil simpleton
Keeley Hawes, as Mrs Stonehouse, is as effective as Sarah Ruth Snook as Siobhan Roy in Succession. These two great actresses will have shared the honor, the advantage and the talent of having been the wives of Matthew Macfadyen, of whom one wonders if the mere presence is not enough to guarantee the success of a film, of a series . From one role to another, across genres, continents and eras, the actor seems to carry with him the same character, the one he created. Prototype of the evil simpleton, of the catastrophic idiot, perpetually saved by the bureaucratic inertia in which he wriggles like a tadpole, helped by the blinding rationality of those who swim alongside him and who cannot believe in his nullity, suspecting him a great hidden intelligence.
We are so delighted, dazzled, that we hold back from bursting out laughing, for fear of missing something. However, the other evening, trying to communicate my enthusiasm to my friend Fabienne, by telling her how Stonehouse revealed to the head of the Czechoslovakian secret service that England was about to release a supersonic airliner, I was literally taken aback. ‘a burst of laughter, but to tears, and I barely manage to recite to him the line from the dismayed Czechoslovak: “The principle of our relationship, Mr Stonehouse, is not that you give us information which appeared the day before in the press.”
Christophe Donner is a writer.
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