Palace of Tears
Cambridge & Berlin, 1975 — The Festival Theatre & Prenzlauer Berg.
PALACE OF TEARS follows a compact, morally tangled ensemble set in 1974–75 Cambridge and Berlin. The novel opens in the aftermath of Peter having left Grace for Ginny, who quickly uses an unexpected pregnancy to secure financial advantage via her wealthy father. Grace, ignorant of these events but conscious that she has only a limited time in which to become pregnant herself, resolves to have a child; rather than count on a conventional partner she fixes on Steve. The two begin a fraught, passionate liaison: Grace offers domestic stability and status, Steve offers youth and fertility.
Parallel to the love-drama runs an espionage thread. Mavis, Steve’s mother, is not merely a lonely civil servant but entangled in intelligence work. In Berlin, she is knocked down in what may be a hit-and-run; Collingwood, a Foreign Office contact who escorts Steve in Berlin hints that darker forces are in play. Steve is reluctantly drawn into a covert courier task — crossing into East Berlin to pass documents to an intermediary named Inge — and discovers how easily erotic encounters can be instrumentalised by intelligence work.
Back in Cambridge and in an attempt to understand life and love in a surveillance state, Steve writes Palace of Tears, a play transposing Berlin’s moral ambiguities to the stage. Gary Lewis, a successful director, mounts the play at the Festival Theatre; rehearsals, casting (and the politics of nudity on stage), production crises and a fraught premiere follow. The play functions as a public testing ground for private wounds: critics, colleagues and lovers converge for the first night, which is a small triumph, but subsequently the mood changes and for reasons that Steve can’t understand he is effectively ostracised.
Behind this change in the play’s fortunes and Steve’s standing lies Sheena Ferguson, Mavis’s former lover and a senior figure in the intelligence apparatus. Grace, compromised both emotionally and professionally, agrees to cooperate in ways that betray Steve; she ultimately breaks with him, claiming she cannot be both mother-substitute and lover. Utterly bemused, Steve leaves Cambridge and returns to his dead mother’s flat in London.