How do you keep up with the cost of having children?
A topical question with the recent rise in costs of living, but one that – based on The Watermill Theatre’s new musical version of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel “Our Man in Havana” – has been relevant to generations of parents.
Expat James Wormold (James Lister) finds himself single-handedly raising daughter Milly (Daniella Agredo Piper) in pre-revolutionary Havana, following the departure of his wife. His career as a vacuum salesman – never, one presumes, the most lucrative of jobs – proves utterly incapable of keeping up with Milly’s extravagances when she commits to purchasing a horse.
Desperate to give her the happiness he fears she lacks (something my own parents failed to grasp whenever I made the case for a Lego version of the Death Star), he agrees to bankroll the purchase – but is left clueless as to he’ll fund it.
Salvation soon arrives in the form of Hawthorne (Alvaro Flores), a Secret Service operative so keen to have an operative in Cuba that he wilfully overlooks the fact that Wormold, whose only social connection is an expat German and who can barely operate the vacuums he sells, may not actually have his finger on the subversive pulse of the city.
But as Wormold’s Germanic friend Hasselbacher (Adam Keast) points out – why go to the trouble of unearthing actual secrets for your reports, when you can just make them up and submit inflated expense claims?
And thus begins Wormold’s career as a spy…
…which turns all the more sinister when the “agents” he’s invented for his reports begin to turn up dead in real life.
Ben Frost and Richard Hough have done a superb job of taking a comedic novel from the 50s and adapting it into the format of a modern musical. Not only do the songs – masterfully performed by the cast under the talented musical direction of Antonio Sanchez (on stage throughout as a piano player) – transport the audience into Cuba, they help to bring out the emotions within the story and underline the tenor of the times.
This gives the story much greater depth than it arguably had on the page, fleshing out Wormold’s lonely plight as a single father and solidifying his motivations for embarking on such a suicidal undertaking. Arguably the strongest scene in the piece is actually a dance he shares with Beatrice (Paula James) – for all his pretence at second-guessing the surface of things, he fails to realise that she’s an undercover Secret Service agent sent to investigate his progressively less-believable reports, seeing only someone to whom he can finally relate.
The music also conveys the sinister undercurrents beneath the exotic surface of Batista’s Cuba – something Greene himself felt that he’d failed to do in the original novel – particularly by bringing more depth and detail to Captain Segura (also Alvaro Flores), here an ambiguous yet terrifying self-confessed torturer, with whom Wormwold plays a now legendary game of checkers.
Reappraisals of the novel in the 60s remarked on the novel’s prescience – Wormold’s tales of seeing missiles hidden in Cuba seemed ridiculous in the ’58, yet the Cuban Missile Crisis was only a revolution and a few assassination attempts away. It’s tempting to reflect on whether any other elements of the plot, inserted for comic effect at the time, have taken an equally prophetic turn over the years.
With solid and engaging performances by a talented cast (often playing multiple characters as well as instruments), an incredibly detailed Swiss Army Knife of a set, and a big, bold and exciting set of songs, this comes highly recommended for fans of comedies, spy capers and Greene’s original novel. And while this really shouldn’t be something that’s rare enough to justify a mention in 2022, the theatre should be commended for not white-washing the cast of a play that isn’t set in Western Europe.
“Our Man In Havana” runs at The Watermill Theatre from the 7th April – 21st May; tickets are available from https://www.watermill.org.uk.
