It’s nearly 400 miles (as the crow flies) from Marlborough in Wiltshire to Pitlochry in Scotland, so perhaps a surprise to find actor Sir Simon Russell Beale and director Ben Occhipinti, both with strong links to Salisbury and resident in Wiltshire, brought together in the Perthshire highlands in the service of Liberace, 20th century superstar of the ivories. If you are lucky, all will be made clear south of the border when Martin Sherman’s wonderfully bonkers new play, I’ll Be Seeing You, heads off on tour.
In the mean time, this hilariously multi-faceted play, in which (of course) Simon RB plays the pianoman who was once the highest-paid entertainer in the world, has delighted and sometimes exasperated audiences in what is known as the Theatre in the Hills. Writer Sherman is 87 now, and makes his professional acting debut in the last few minutes of the story – he was last on stage as a teenage drama student in America. Already the critics have described I’ll Be Seeing You as a play about living truthfully, as a comedy, as a social drama, as a triumph and as a confused mish mash. One has even suggested that SRB makes Liberace dull … I’m not quite sure what play he was seeing, but maybe he got lost in those hills?
The second star of the show is Irish actor Fra Fee, and he opens the proceedings, introducing the audience to a conspicuously well-hung, hung over, promiscuous and penniless playwright, commissioned by a Scottish theatre company to write a play about a man he loathes – one Władziu Valentino Liberace. In the opinion of The Writer (Fee), Liberace was a cowardly, hypocritical waste of space. The despicable squillionaire pianist had publicly denied his homosexuality, thus depriving the newly-authorised and liberated 21st century queer world of an important role model.
But our Liberace is not one to allow his reputation to be besmirched by a relatively unsavoury newcomer, so he steps in from beyond the grave to put the story right. And from then on the spectacle is unending. Simon Russell Beale’s Liberace appears from every orifice the stage has to offer, in extravagantly colourful and exotically adorned costumes, once from the sky, once from a Cadillac, once bursting through a screen. His wonderfully flexible face is as enchanting as the clothes, wicked eyes making regular contact with members of the audience, every innuendo naughty but not really offensive. It’s a tour de force.
His Catholic-rooted camp is firmly on the side of entertainment, while The Writer’s combatively entitled queerness might just be masking an empty life filled by drugs, drink and disparate dicks (albeit owned by graduates. There’s swank!).
I’ll Be Seeing You is part of actor Alan Cumming’s first season at Pitlochry, and he co-directs the play with Ben Occhipinti. It’s a coup in so many ways, specially bringing Sherman to the stage. The writer of Bent, and of Messiah, and of Mrs Henderson Presents, and of Rose, morphs out of The Writer, who may be the sort of young man he always wished he had been able to be – or may be a step too far.
The cast is completed by two hunky young assistants to the Great Man (Ali Watt and Adam Kashmiry), and Anne Lacey, who not only puts in appearances as a Mother Superior and an audience member straight out of The Sound of Music, but also has an astonishing monologue in which she combines the thoughts (and voices) of both The Writer’s Irish and Liberace’s Polish mothers.
Look out for notice of a tour, and buy a ticket if you can.
GP-W