I’ll Be Seeing You with Simon Russell Beale and Fra Fee at Pitlochry Festival Theatre – review

When you go to see a play about Liberace, starring Simon Russell Beale and co-directed by Alan Cumming (with Ben Occhipinti), you don’t go because you’re expecting quiet understatement; and I’ll Be Seeing You, a new play by Martin Sherman receiving its premiere at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, certainly doesn’t disappoint when it comes to showy bravura.

The production throws everything but the kitchen sink at the story of the outrageously camp entertainer, and Tim Hatley’s designs deserve an award of their own. Every time you think they’ve reached the max, they chuck in something else like some extra footlights or a spangly car, and I dread to think how much the costume budget on its own must have come to.

Yet there’s more to this show than biography and glitz. Sherman’s structure is complex and pleasingly grown up, centring on a writer, played by Fra Fee, who has been commissioned to write a play about Liberace, a character he hates. Liberace invades the writer’s consciousness and takes over the process of telling the story in a way that breaks down the boundaries between them and forces the writer to question his moral superiority.

In the process, the fourth wall isn’t so much broken as demolished, and Sherman has a terrific time playing with some deliciously exuberant language, not to mention a string of sexual innuendos about, for example, “correct fingering” or being “thoroughly hoisted.”

The final sequence, where Liberace meets the writer’s older self, feels like a Chinese box too far, and while the Rubik’s cube plot is exhilarating to experience, it sometimes feels a bit too self-referential, almost smug in its cleverness.

The play contains some fantastic set pieces – including an uncomfortable flirtation scene that leads to some protracted masturbation, an outrageous “Ave Maria”, and a showpiece melding of Polish and Irish accents as Liberace’s and the author’s mothers seem to merge. I sometimes wondered, though, whether there was much depth beyond those set pieces or whether we were all being bewitched by the glitter.

Either way, the performances are great. Beale has a whale of a time as Liberace, nailing the character’s physicality, and enjoying himself enormously in another layer-upon-layer scene when Liberace effectively plays himself by reading the transcript of his libel trial.

Fee is a good foil for him, bristling with righteous indignation that eventually crumples, and Sherman himself appears to play the writer’s older self (Can you see what they’ve done there?). Anne Lacey is marvellous in several roles that include Liberace’s mother, and Ali Watt and Adam Kashmiry are suitably over-the-top as two of Liberace’s hunky hangers-on.

So, I’m not sure how deep I’ll Be Seeing You really goes, but it’s enormous fun to watch, and you have to take your hat off to its ambition. You certainly won’t see anything as camp as this before Christmas, and one more thing is for sure: Pitlochry would never have seen anything like this before Cumming took over as artistic director.