Cuckoos, Princes and betrayal
Two extraordinary betrayals are still on show in London.
But not for much longer, because one of them, Mark Thomas: Cuckooed, finishes on 13 December (though will continue its national tour next year).
The second, The Green Prince, opens at various cinemas on Friday.
Both are fascinating.
Thomas’ show is an account – true in every fact except one – of how he and a group of anti-arms trade campaigners were spied on and betrayed by a colleague.
It’s a brilliant, funny, sad, puzzling account of an affair that finally came to a light through a check on the group’s computers. Even then, when the evidence pointed in one direction, the culprit was so much a part of the group, such a strong personality, such a friend, that not everyone could believe it.
Thomas telling of the group’s activities, the description of the campaigners, the reactions to the unmasking and his attempt to confront the traitor, is riveting, and is given an extra dimension by the parallel public unpeeling of the activities of some of Britain’s undercover police, who infiltrated campaign groups by having affairs – and children – with women activists.
One of the women, Jacqui, who had a child with undercover police officer Bob Lambert, recently settled her legal case with the police for £425,000. She is among those whose experiences will be dramatised in a crowd-funded, four-part TV series, Undercovers.
Meanwhile, the second of this week’s focus on treachery (if you’re on the betrayed side), The Green Prince, launches on 12 December.
It is the – also amazing – story of how the Israeli secret service “turned” the son of a Hamas leader and persuaded him to act as a spy for years. The core of the film is the spliced interviews with the two men, which is supplemented and made real by contemporaneous newsreel shots. And when The Green Prince finally withdraws from the spying game and moves to the US there is another startling twist, which brings the two men together again.
+ Thomas exposes the corporate spy cuckoo in the campaigners' nest
Mark Thomas tour:
January 2015
February 2015
March 2015
April 2015
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