About the work
A Question of Attribution is a one-act play by the British playwright Alan Bennett about the art historian Sir Anthony Blunt. It premiered at the National Theatre in London on 1 December 1988, directed by Simon Callow, on the same bill as Bennett's stage version of An Englishman Abroad; together the two plays form the double bill Single Spies. After the transfer to London's Queen's Theatre in 1989, Bennett lightly revised the text for a television film broadcast by the BBC in 1991.
Plot
Blunt is the Queen's art adviser and Surveyor of her pictures, yet MI5 has long known him to be a former Soviet agent and keeps questioning him through the officer Chubb. Meanwhile he investigates a double portrait only partly attributed to Titian and discovers a further figure beneath the overpainting. While rehanging pictures at Buckingham Palace he unexpectedly meets the Queen; their conversation about art, fakes and secrets quietly turns into an interrogation more searching than the security service's.
Cultural significance
Bennett links the question of who painted a picture with the question of guilt and complicity in the case of the Cambridge spies. The double bill Single Spies received the Laurence Olivier Award for Comedy of the Year (1989/90 awards), and Prunella Scales was nominated for her performance as the Queen; John Schlesinger's television version won the 1992 BAFTA for Best Single Drama.