Our Man in Havana – Oxford Playhouse

Writer: Graham Greene

Adaptor: Clive Francis

Director: Philip Wilson

There are striking similarities between this production of Clive Francis’s 2007 stage version of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana and Patrick Barlow’s 2005 reworking of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. Both were preceded by a film treatment, and both treat the plot as an exercise in ingenuity, having all the parts played by only four actors, with one central figure as the focus.

But Barlow’s idea seems more outrageous, because he is making a spoof version of a serious thriller. Greene, on the other hand, conceived his story as a comedy from the outset (and worked closely with director Carol Reed to make the film version with Alec Guinness). And Clive Francis (the actor known to audiences as the suave Foreign Office mole Luke in Yes, Prime Minister) has merely applied Barlow’s principle to bring it to the stage.

The effect is largely successful. Philip Wilson’s direction shows boundless ingenuity, and keeps up a relentless pace as the actors, the set and the costumes switch from one scene to the next – though the running time of 2 ¾ hours puts a certain strain on the attention of the audience. It might have been wise to have streamlined the plot a little, which appears to cover most of the detail of the novel.

In outline, Greene is drawing on his MI6 experience, and takes a humble vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, James Wormold, who is enticed by Hawthorne to become a spy to make a bit more money to placate his needy daughter, Milly. Inventing ‘information’ to satisfy London, including sketches based on his own vacuum cleaner supplies purporting to show plans for a military installation, he becomes more and more entangled with dangers both real and imagined. He is sent a secretary, Beatrice Severn, from London, who helps him and falls in love with him, to produce the happy ending.

Julie Godfrey’s set is a massive Cuban 1950s façade, with a central archway which can become in an instant, a nightclub, a bar, a hotel – and multiple other set elements are wheeled in from the side to make an office, a gents, an apartment, a car. (It must be a nightmare in terms of mere volume for a touring production.)

Jack Ashton plays Wormold, the character around whom all the others revolve, with a charming blend of bemusement, bravado and panic. In his white colonial suit, he provides the focus for the plot throughout, as the other actors switch from character to character around him, and he does very much hold the plot together.

Bob Barrett (familiar to television audiences from Holby City) moves easily from the genial London handler Hawthorne to dangerous spy Carter to German émigré Hasselbacher, and manages the changes of costume and accent effortlessly. (The speed of some of the costume changes is remarkable. The actors’ dressers are sometimes visible at the side of the stage – and are, probably rightly, included in the curtain call at the end.)

Leon Ockenden offers a bewildering array of characters: an extravagantly camp bank teller, a dangerously smooth Cuban military Captain Segura, an exaggeratedly Latin Lopez, and offers perhaps the most extreme variations of persona.

And Jodie Steele is perhaps most impressive in her mix of comic movement and characterisation as she switches from petulant Milly to a strikingly touching Beatrice, whose formidable intelligence and feeling seem rather a shock amid the otherwise broad brush of the production, and she lends some conviction to the romantic conclusion of the play.

It is so involved that it is not always easy to follow the plot, but the pace and the inventiveness are engaging, and offer plenty of entertainment.

Runs until 1 August 2026 and on tour