Fast paced and fast moving this farce from the pen of Graham Greene is a sheer delight.
It’s Cuba 1958. Meet Jim Wormwold – a hapless vacuum cleaner salesman who gets sucked into a dirty world of espionage when the chance of helping out MI6 with a job or two proves too good an offer.
Clive Francis’s stage adaptation fillets the novel into an exhausting four-handed farce.
Charles Davis’ portrayal of Jim Wormold is a dishevelled portrait of a conventionally clueless English expat who notes that his new secretary and his teenage daughter (both played by Isla Carter) seem to have much in common.
Between them James Dinsmore and Michael Onslow play a bewildering number of agents, nuns, brothel madams and a sadistic chief of police whose smile is described as being “squeezed out from the wrong place, like toothpaste from a split in the tube”.
Russell Cook
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