Review: OUR MAN IN HAVANA, Theatre Royal Windsor - Tour
Photo credit: Jack Merriman
An orange glow greets you as you enter the auditorium at the Theatre Royal Windsor from the open stage with a full-scale box set that beautifully creates the scene and as the audience take their seats waving fans, you can feel the heat as you are transported to the Havana in Cuba.
Graham Greene’s 1957 novel was made into a classic film with Sir Alec Guiness in 1959 and is said to originate the classic phrase “our man in…”. It is a black comedy, a spoof spy story, a sort of early version of the bumbling Jonny English or David Niven’s 1967 James Bond, you recognise all of the cliches as vacuum salesman James Wormold finds himself cast as a spy, a role he is totally unsuitable for.
In adapting the tale for the stage, Clive Francis builds on the fun of the characters by having all of the roles played by just four actors, described as Voice 1 to Voice 4, borrowing the idea from Patrick Barlow’s wonderful stage adaptation of The 39 Steps. It creates most of the fun of the show, with quick costume changes and swift changes of accents and personas, and the cast do a remarkable job portraying all of them.
Jack Ashton has perhaps the easiest task as the salesman Wormold, dressed in a white suit and overcoming his bewilderment at being recruited a British spy to invent a whole array of sub agents to gather information (which he makes up) in order to secure an ever-growing income from the foolish British Government. They only become suspicious when he uses elements from his vacuum cleaner range to create drawings of “weapons of mass destruction”. Who would have thought that any government could be fooled about false stories of weapons of mass destruction?!
Bob Barrett plays the German World War I veteran emigree to Cuba, Dr Hasselbacher, before switching to be the very English spy master who recruits Wormold, Hawthorne and then camping it wonderfully as Teresa, the stripper at the Shanghai Theatre. He returns as Carter, supposedly another vacuum cleaner salesman, who Wormold suspects is out to kill him.
Leon Ockendon as Voice 3 plays a host of oddball characters, from Lopez the shop assistant through various waiters and porters, to the curious MI6 figure in London with a black monocle and the pivotal role of local military man Captain Segura.
But the actor who makes the most impact is Jodie Steele as Voice 4. She plays Wormold’s demanding teenage daughter Milly who wants a horse and is pursued by Segura before becoming the secretary, Beatrice, sent to London to investigate the network of spies. Francis could not resist the line “there is something about you that reminds me of her”. She has great fun too as O’Toole, the Irish vacuum salesman role, plays a dying dog, and then appears as a seductive dancer in a brothel. Each character is delightfully created, and the theatricality is heightened by some very quick costume changes too.
This story is very episodic with many short scenes between characters and as a result, Francis uses a lot of exposition from the actors, out of character, to fill in the gaps. It is well choreographed and directed by Philip Wilson as they deliver furniture and props for the scene, drop a line of narration and jump into character. You have to admire the technique and the delivery, and it is consistent with the spoof tone of the play, but it is no substitute for proper character development and narrative storytelling and reinforces the cartoon feel to the characters. It is as if they fill the speech bubbles in character while setting the scene in captions as narrators. At two hours forty-five minutes in length, it does also feel too long.
It is an enjoyable romp, a farcical escapade and technically very well executed and yet, perhaps due to the heat of the day, it did not grip our attention or make us laugh out loud as much as we might have expected. The 39 Steps took a classic novel and film and brilliantly adapted it to the stage; we were left with a sense that with fine tuning, this could have been every bit as good.
*** Three stars
Reviewed by: Nick Wayne