The score is geographically two-tone – mambo and rumba rhythms for locals, such as the twice-reprised The Streets of Havana – and Noël Cowardly recitative and patter for Nigel Lister’s imperfect spy James Wormold. One of the strongest songs, The Perfect Spy, alluding to a Le Carré title, nicely honours two of the greatest English writers about public and private deceit. In their musical version, world premiering at the picturesque and enterprising Watermill, Richard Hough (book and lyrics) and Ben Morales Frost (music), are alert to both the story’s topicalities about the unreliability of information and the chain of literary heritage. Greene’s spy fiction heir, John le Carré, so admired Our Man in Havana that he wrote an acknowledged homage in The Tailor of Panama. Three years later, Our Man in Havana, in which an English expat vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba sells fake secrets to MI6 for cash, was an espionage farce that turned serious with the Iraq “dodgy dossier” and other blurring of fact and fabrication. The Quiet American (1955) spookily previewed America’s disaster in Vietnam. T hough equivocal about many aspects of religion, Graham Greene had nearly supernatural gifts of prophecy as a novelist.
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