CURRENTLY online before its live theatre tour, Ben Brown’s new play demonstrates that drama without action can hold an audience’s attention if blessed with superb acting and a subject of intense interest.

As a play relating to what happened at the meeting of two people who played a significant part in modern history, A Splinter of Ice is reminiscent of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. But here the subject is not the reason why Nazi Germany did not achieve the catastrophic breakthrough to splitting the atom before the Allies but why a man who had all the gifts his country could offer would devote his life to betraying it.

In Copenhagen, the enigmatic 1941 meeting of physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg is presented in some afterlife world. But the 1987 Moscow meeting of old MI6 comrades, the novelist  Graham Greene and Kim Philby — the “third man” in the so-called Cambridge spy ring who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963 — is anything but fanciful.

The famous Third Man zither music from the classic film noir written by Greene foregrounds the revelation from the grateful Philby that he believed that it had been the way in which the writer had warned him of his imminent exposure as a Soviet agent.

There is a subtle rhythm to the confrontation of two old friends reunited after 30 years. The early slight awkwardness, with a trace of mutually suspicious sparring, relaxes into companionable alcoholic ease. It leads to a startling surprise when the celebrated writer finally reveals another reason for his visit to Britain’s most famous spy.

Oliver Ford Davies’s Greene, admitting that in many ways his skills as a novelist are akin to those of a practised spy or Catholic priest, teases out a kind of confessional account of his life from Stephen Boxer’s world-weary Philby who, in the process, reveals his all-encompassing faith in communism.

There is a wry humour underlying a resigned loneliness to his engaging personality and he admits that he did canvas for the Labour Party — once. Sara Crowe, as Philby’s devoted Russian wife Rufa, provides a level of domestic normality and affection in his social isolation.

The production by Alan Strachan and Alastair Whatley was filmed for the online version in Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre — an ironic nod here to the fact that the town houses Britain’s giant GCHQ spy factory?

Whatever, while the online treatment makes effective use of cinematic close-ups, notably of Oliver Ford Davies’s querying facial expressions  — a commentary in themselves — there is a theatrical, live tension in a play which is much more than a piece of history.

Like Copenhagen, A Splinter of Ice may not engage with the potential destruction of our world but it perceptively explores the cost to be paid in human relationships by those caught up in the labyrinth of political power play.

The Original Theatre Company’s production of A Splinter of Ice is available online until July 31, visit originaltheatreonline.com. It tours theatres nationally from June 8 until July 31.