York Theatre Royal – until 3 June 2017. Reviewed by Marcus Roderick
Our Man In Havana is a classic novel about spies, secrets and vacuums. The Graham Greene novel follows Wormold, a vacuum cleaner seller who gets caught up in MI6 and finds that there is a lot of money to be made from twisting and making up information about the enemy. The comedy with its farcical plot creates for a hilarious and often confusing story. Set in Cuba a melting pot of cultures and corruption the adaption plays on the underlying themes that are in the book.
With its small cast of 4 we are given multi-rolling between three of the actors with Charles Davis playing Wormold, although he often came out of character to narrate along with his fellow actors. The rest of the cast took on the role of the narrator more than Davis and all did a fantastic job of working with each other to make sure the narration was snappy between the actors. Isla Carter took on the role of Milly, Wormold’s daughter and Beatrice Wormold’s love interest – with the added joke ‘you look a lot like my daughter’, Carter took on both roles with such passion capturing the difference’s rather well. James Dinsmore became the secret spy Hawthorne and the German Doctor Hasselbacher who is the main target from Hawthorne, sounds confusing, don’t worry it’s easy to tell the two characters apart, but for a brief moment in the play he takes on the role of a female stripper name Teresa and by God there were some laughs. The fourth and final actor Michael Onslow, who took on the more comical roles in the play from Wormold’s assistant Lopez to the corrupt Segura the leader of the police. All of the actors did an amazing job in both creating an amazing story even more entertaining and enthralling and making the audience laugh with pleasant and light humour.
The set has some palm tree to both sides of the stage with some lights in them that came on during different scenes, but the main feature is a table, this table, well desk, is used in nearly all of the scenes and moved every scene, however this was so quick and were some of the quickest scene changes I’ve seen, I have to give the director Amanda Knott credit in the ingenuity and creative of how props are used in a simple but effective way.
The play will appeal to older people more rather than the younger generation, as the novel was released in their childhood and became a stand out from the crowd, however since there aren’t that many references to issues at the time it can be easily understood by even a younger person, that is to note however as there are a few cuss words in the play. I loved the play and I would describe it as light-hearted and pleasant to watch, it is going on tour across the UK and is midway and is in York until 3rd June with its next stop in Windsor.