Review: Our Man in Havana (Oxford Playhouse)

Graham Greene's black comedy Our Man in Havana, has been adapted for the stage by Clive Francis and is currently touring the UK. I was pleased to be able to review the show at Oxford Playhouse.

On walking into the auditorium we instantly noticed the set (Julie Godfrey), which was a lovely design, along with music that evoked the setting of Cuba. It must also be said that throughout the performance, the lighting design by Nick Richings and the sound design by Andy Graham stood out.  In fact, the design elements were my favourite parts of this production.

The narrative is about James Wormold (Jack Ashton) who is a British vacuum cleaner salesman in 1950s Havana. Financially struggling, he is recruited by MI6 to be a spy, and as he has no relevant skills at all he creates a whole word of fiction around this.

We had four actors playing every character.  Jack Ashton solely played Wormold so that left the other three playing over thirty others between them.  The actors are all talented, experienced, and did a great job with the script and direction they were given, however the distinction between characters was unclear at times, so it became tricky to make out all of the characters and how they related to each other as they blended with each other.  The one exception to this was Jodie Steele’s characters which seemed to have more distinct characteristics, accents and costumes. I particularly loved her portrayal of Wormold's daughter Milly, and the scenes with the pair of them in were some of my favourite scenes, however even with that said, I think the direction was to play Milly in a way that would have suited a much younger child than a 17 turning 18 year old.

The many costume changes seemed to happen in a flash at times, and the dressers involved very rightly joined the cast on stage during the curtain call. However, even with these speedy changes, some of the costumes were similar between characters and this added to the confusion of who was who. I understand why it may have felt like an interesting idea to multi-role however I do feel this may have worked better with either a few more actors, or more distinct costumes, accents and mannerisms for each.

Production photo by Jack Merriman

There were significant moments when the cast broke the fourth wall and gave the audience an update throughout the show. This felt a bit jarring and unnecessary and broke the engagement with the performances even further.

At over two and a half hours, Our Man in Havana felt drawn out, although the second half was more entertaining than the first and the audience reaction was more positive during the comedy in the second half too. The comedy itself was at times veering towards panto rather than the dark humour I was expecting. I would also have expected the pacing to have been a bit more frantic, building up a sense of tension, but this was lacking, and at times there could have been a cut of unnecessary words from the script which would have helped with this.

As always please remember reviews are the view of one person.  I would imagine if you know the story as written by Graham Greene, the character changes would not be so much of an issue as you’d be familiar with them already.  Sadly for us, we ended up confused to the point of distraction.

⭐⭐1/2

Our Man in Havana is showing at Oxford Playhouse until 1 August 2026.

I was gifted tickets for this show in exchange for an honest review.