I’ll Be Seeing You
★★★☆☆ One-note
Pitlochry Festival Theatre: Tue 22 Sep – Sun 11 Oct 2026
Review by Hugh Simpson
The Pitlochry premiere of I’ll Be Seeing You by Martin Sherman is sprinkled with stardust, but the glitter is applied unevenly to a production that infuriates as much as it satisfies.
A writer (Fra Fee) has been commissioned to write a play about Liberace, the over-the-top piano player and self-styled ‘Mr Showmanship’ who was a star of the early days of television and at one time the highest-paid entertainer in the world.
Ali Watt and Simon Russell Beale in I’ll Be Seeing You. Pic: Tiu Makkonen
But writing such a play is not an easy enterprise, not least because of the writer’s unease about how the barely-closeted pianist presented himself, including (successfully) suing the Daily Mirror for insinuating he was gay. Then Liberace himself (Simon Russell Beale) literally flies in and takes over proceedings.
So far, so pleasingly meta, and the play continues in a riotously exuberant manner, with the writer’s garret increasingly taken over by bejewelled limos and hunks in spangled shorts. It’s all playful and amusing, with Russell Beale’s Liberace both suitably fabulous and vulnerably human, while Fee’s writer is fallible, conflicted and funny.
thought-provoking notions
There are wonderful moments and thought-provoking notions, but the play never really resolves itself into a coherent theatrical experience. Liberace’s motives for his Mirror lawsuit are constantly returned to, and the differences between the lives of gay men in the 50s and now are explored, but any profundity, and much of the narrative thread, tends to be overshadowed by the primary-coloured set pieces.
Playwrights have been known to overestimate the audience’s interest in the nuts and bolts of making a play, and this does often threaten to move from the wittily self-referential into the annoyingly self-indulgent.
Simon Russell Beale and Fra Fee in I’ll Be Seeing You. Pic: Tiu Makkonen
Individual moments please – Anne Lacey as a combination of the two lead characters’ mothers, a thoughtful interlude with Ali Watt as Liberace’s ‘chauffeur’, Adam Kashmiry as the other ‘hunk’, the professional stage acting debut of Sherman himself for reasons that can’t be explored without giving too much away.
The direction of Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti is wonderfully wide-ranging, Tim Hatley’s design is excellent, and the lighting (Grant Anderson) and sound (Occhipinti) add to the sense of spectacle.
In the end, however, like so many plays around the 90-minute mark, it sometimes seems like a more intimate 50-minute piece artificially extended, and while always fun it ends up being more superficial and one-note than it promises.
Running time: One hour and 25 minutes (no interval).
Pitlochry Festival Theatre (Main Stage), Port-na-craig Road, Pitlochry, PH16 5DR.
Tuesday 22 September – Sunday 11 October 2026.
Wed – Sat (& Tue 22): 7.30 pm; Matinees Wed, Thurs, Sat, Sun: 2pm
Tickets and details: Book here.
Pitlochry Festival Theatre website: www.pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com
Facebook: @pitlochryfestivaltheatre
Instagram: @pitlochryft
TikTok: @pitlochryft
Simon Russell Beale with Fra Fee in I’ll Be Seeing You. Pic: Tiu Makkonen
ENDS
