Simon Russell Beale on playing Liberace at Pitlochry: 'the image he built was quite complex'
Liberace’s critics may have dismissed him as flashy and vulgar, but Martin Sherman’s new play offers an fresh perspective on the storied entertainer, writes Joyce McMillan
The time is the present day; and a young writer has been commissioned to write a play about Liberace, the astonishingly gifted and flamboyant pianist and entertainer who forged a brilliant career on the variety stages and television screens of the western world during the postwar era.
This is not the young writer’s favourite assignment. Like most young people today, he tends to despise figures like Liberace, who cloaked their gay sexuality in dazzling layers of showbiz camp, and used that image to build successful careers, while always denying that they were homosexual.
As he struggles to start writing, though, the writer suddenly finds that he has a visitor in the shape of Liberace himself, who died back in 1987; and so begins Martin Sherman’s new play I’ll Be Seeing You, which receives its world premiere at Pitlochry Festival Theatre next week. Sherman, now in his 80s, is one of the great gay playwrights of his generation, the author - among many other works - of the groundbreaking and transformative 1979 drama Bent, about two homosexual prisoners at Auschwitz.
And at Pitlochry, Sherman’s play features an equally stellar cast, with multi-award-winning actor Simon Russell Beale - seen by many as the greatest British stage actor of his generation - taking on the role of Liberace, while brilliant young Northern Irish actor and singer Fra Fee plays the young writer, and Sherman himself, at 87, makes a professional stage debut as the older writer.
“I began writing this play about ten years ago,” explains Sherman, “and we had hoped to premiere it in London - but then Covid came along, and everything stopped. But Alan Cumming had always been interested in the project; and when he took over as artistic director at Pitlochry, he said he’d love to direct the play here.
“So here we are - although the play itself, once I let my subconscious really run with it, turns out not really to be about Liberace, but about the artifice behind the artifice of his public image. I had wanted to write a play about his journey as a gay man; but in fact, he didn’t really make a journey as a gay man, since he always publicly denied that part of himself. And I suppose that’s a difference between Liberace’s generation and mine.”
Sherman was born in Philadelphia in 1938, Liberace in Wisconsin in 1919; Sherman remembers, as a teenager in the early 1950s, seeing Liberace play live, at a Philadelphia variety theatre. And a short generation younger again is Simon Russell Beale, born in 1961. He forged part of his early acting career in the legendary Traverse Theatre seasons of the mid-1980s, alongside Tilda Swinton; and says that as a young gay man in the 1980s, he viewed Liberace - and other closeted gay figures of the postwar period - with the same contempt as the young writer in the play.
“I think we felt,” says Russell Beale, “that a man like Liberace could have been a hero, if only he had been more open about his sexuality; but he chose not to, and we hated that. So there is this generational thing going on in the play; and it’s almost like seeing the young gay me in dialogue with Liberace, who comes on in extravagant costume as he always did, and invades the writer’s study.
“To me, he was always someone that my mother or grandmother might have liked - he was a joke. So this is a chance to look at his life, and to begin to understand why he lived as he did. There’s also a kind of snobbish big lie about Liberace, which is that he had no real talent, and was really just flashy and vulgar.
“In fact, though, he was a tremendously accomplished virtuoso pianist, who opted to work in light entertainment, and to reach out to ordinary people; and the image he built was really quite complex. Playing him reminds me of a theatre season I once did about fops - those wonderful male beaus and dandies who appear in Restoration and 18th century drama. They’re flamboyant and fun and probably gay, but definitely male; and women often absolutely love them.”
Despite its focus on the two main characters, though, Sherman's play is not a modest two-hander. It features plenty of music, song and dance, and a cast of six, also including Anne Lacey as Liberace’s mother, Ali Watt as his chauffeur and lover of many years, and Adam Kashmiry as a particularly handsome chorus boy; and like Alan Cumming - who directs alongside associate Ben Occhipinti - Fra Fee sees the play almost as a cabaret.
“There’s a fantastical, dream-like element to it,” says Fee, “and the song and dance numbers seem born of that. The young writer says he hates Liberace; and yet suddenly, he finds himself confronted with a version of the man himself - so there he is, a young gay writer, struggling to make peace with this figure from the past.”
Sherman agrees. “I think I have made my own peace with Liberace through this play,” he says. “When you’re young, you’re quick to judge. But now, in writing this play, I’ve come to see that in some ways there’s as much self-doubt, and as much self-hatred, in the young gay writer as there was in Liberace’s generation, although it takes different forms.
“And as for my own role - well, acting is proving not to be as unnerving an experience as I thought. I have just one scene, with Simon; and he’s such a wonderful actor, so completely absorbed in the world of the play, that he just draws you right into it, too. I think we should always have adventures at any age, shouldn’t we? This is a real adventure for me, at Pitlochry this autumn; and so far, I’m enjoying every moment.”
I’ll Be Seeing You is at Pitlochry Festival Theatre from 22 September until 11 October.
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