Simon Russell Beale makes his entrance in mid-air, appearing some way above the stage in a heavenly haze of smoke and light. He flashes a voluminous silver cape and spangly waistcoat, his eyes wide and imploring as if he cannot believe it either. It is flashy and flamboyant and it is a problem for Fra Fee.
In this headily meta new play by Martin Sherman, still provocative and unexpected at the age of 87, Fee plays a writer commissioned by Pitlochry Festival theatre to turn out a play about Liberace. The only thing is, he despises everything the American showbiz pianist stands for. Russell Beale has smashed into designer Tim Hatley’s previously orderly front-room set with the kind of over-the-top flourish that only Liberace could pull off.
And that is what infuriates the writer. As a young gay man, he is embarrassed by the innuendo, the materialism and the deceit. He is hung up in particular by the entertainer’s successful 1959 court action against a Daily Mirror columnist who had implied he was a homosexual (more precisely, a “quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love”).
Not only the young writer but also, it would seem, Sherman himself is dismayed by Liberace’s willingness to lie on oath, denying his sexuality just as he would deny the HIV diagnosis at the end of his life. But the more the writer obsesses about that lie, the less Liberace’s court-room denial seems to be the issue. Sherman, the elderly playwright looking back on his life – and making his stage debut to do so – sees in Liberace the frivolous opposite of himself.
The man who made his name with Bent, a play about gay persecution during the Holocaust, has nothing in common with the pianist’s rhinestone-and-candelabra escapism. Yet, in a merrily wayward production co-directed by Ben Occhipinti and Alan Cumming, Russell Beale keeps barging in, demanding the limelight, milking the applause. Liberace’s life force is too great to be tamed.
In a struggle between the earnest and the ephemeral, he might well be the victor. By the end, the pianist is spoon-feeding ice-cream into the mouth of the playwright, a man infantilised by a hopeless battle.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
