Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Four Stars
Showbiz secrets didn’t come much glitzier than those of Liberace, the piano playing artist christened Władziu Valentino, who dropped his first names and became a superstar. As the young writer who greets us at the start of Martin Sherman’s new play also makes clear, as far as he is concerned, Liberace’s refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality throughout his life was a betrayal of all those who were out and proud. His successful 1959 court victory over the Daily Mirror’s allusions to his sexuality is key to the writer’s contempt. Liberace’s death in 1987 from causes of AIDS with his gayness still unacknowledged fuels the writer’s ire even more.
As if accidentally summoning a genie, the writer’s angry ruminations about having to write about someone he hates prompts Liberace to swoop in from the heavens and grandstand his way into his affections. What follows in this production co directed by Pitlochry Festival Theatre artistic director Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti is an audacious gay fantasia that fuses anecdotal biography with surreal fever dream. Set on designer Tim Hatley’s suitably OTT set, these leaps of the imagination make for a delirious cross generational debate that transcends its inherent campness into a more touching display.
Fra Fee’s writer is a bundle of anxious energy before the star of the show appears, as Simon Russell Beale embodies Liberace’s flamboyant largesse with a couple of hunks and a glittery Rolls Royce in tow before getting beyond the sparkle. With Anne Lacey bringing a mother’s eye view to bear before being wheeled on as the Statue of Liberty, it is left to an eighty something Sherman himself to make an appearance in the play he has been wrestling with all along. The end result is a dramatic elegy, to Liberace, to all the others who died, and possibly to himself in this shiniest of theatrical homages.
The Herald, October 3rd 2026
Ends
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