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Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana

In 1950s Cuba, revolution is in the air...and the British Secret Service needs a new source of intelligence. Read more …

Enter Jim Wormold, a hapless vacuum-cleaner salesman. Struggling to pay for his teenage daughter’s extravagant lifestyle, Wormold can’t resist the financial rewards offered for becoming HM Government’s ‘man in Havana’. There’s just one problem: he’s clueless about politics and wouldn’t know a dead letter drop from a double agent.

So Wormold decides that invention is the best course of action. And soon, reports of his recruitment of shadowy agents (entirely imaginary) and copies of top secret military plans (diagrams of vacuum-cleaner parts) begin to cross the Atlantic.

But whilst Whitehall is delighted, the regime in Havana is appalled. For it turns out that Wormold’s fantasies are alarmingly close to the truth. And it’s quickly decided that Wormold – and his “agents“ – must disappear.

In Clive Francis’s hilarious adaptation, Graham Greene’s classic spy satire (memorably filmed in 1959 with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward) is transformed into a high octane romp through the colourful bars and seedy backstreets of Havana. Featuring a bewildering array of characters played by just four actors, this spectacular tour de force shares the same theatrical DNA as our hugely popular production of The 39 Steps in 2012.


The critical consensus

All in all, it’s a little gem of entertainment.

Joy Watters, Across the Arts, 02/11/2015

If this is an adaptation that never digs too deeply into Greene’s ever-present undercurrent of darkness, though, Richard Baron’s production whips it up into a delicious, witty and highly satirical entertainment.

****(*)Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, 31/10/2015

Baron’s take on Greene’s comedy is entertaining, even if it occasionally tests the patience, with too many laughs derived from frantic mugging and lines delivered in exaggerated foreign accents.

***(*)(*)Allan Radcliffe, 02/11/2015

The structure of the play frustrates all attempts to give it momentum. Consequently, despite some genuinely funny moments, the piece seems formulaic and lacklustre.

Mark Brown, Scottish Stage, 02/11/2015

Playing more than thirty characters between them, Roger Delves-Broughton, Jessica Guise and Steven McNicoll have tremendous fun throwing on new disguises in a merry dance of a show in which old loyalties to Queen and country are shown up to be elaborate fictions that begin to look increasingly absurd.

****(*)Neil Cooper, Coffee-Table Notes, 12/11/2015

Where and when?

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry from Thursday October 22, 2015, until Saturday November 14, 2015. More info: www.pitlochry.org.uk

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