I'll Be Seeing You review – Simon Russell Beale's Liberace is a force too big to tame

A new play by Martin Sherman, I'll Be Seeing You, showing at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, follows a writer wrestling with how to portray the flamboyant pianist and entertainer Liberace, according to a review in the Guardian.

The play is described by the review as a meta work: Fra Fee plays the writer character, who struggles to complete a play about Liberace while, according to the review, despising everything the showman stands for.

Simon Russell Beale takes on the role of Liberace himself, and the review describes a striking entrance in which his character appears in mid-air, some way above the stage, amid a heavenly haze of smoke and light, dressed in a voluminous silver cape and spangly waistcoat.

The review characterises Beale's performance and the production's staging as flashy and flamboyant, framing Liberace as a personality whose scale and theatricality pose a direct challenge for the fictional writer at the play's centre trying to make sense of him on paper.

The Guardian's review situates the production as an examination of the gap between a showman's public persona and the difficulty of capturing that persona honestly in a written work.