Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

A double agent for both the Metropolitan Police and the Russian government finds his position increasingly precarious, even risking the safety of his family. Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel is a morally complex study of isolation and madness in 19th-century London, with Glass’s sweeping score evoking the claustrophobia of life at the heart of a turbulent industrial city, whose barely civilised veneer masks talk of revolution and political terrorism.