"Is there nothing you won't believe?" It's a good question, and one pertinent to Rob Beacham's one-man show, performed by Philip York, about the life, death and nefarious activities of Robert Maxwell. In 1991, the Czech-born former Labour MP, self-made multi-millionaire businessman and owner of the Mirror newspaper, disappeared from his luxury yacht in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. The conspiracy theorists had a field day suggesting that he had been done away with by Russia mafia hit-men, or by the Palestinians who objected to his close relationship with Israel and rumoured links with Mossad.
But it was not long before another more mundane and convincing reason for his death emerged. By the time Maxwell's swollen body was found floating in the sea, the bouncing Czech had helped himself to millions of pounds of other people's money, using the Mirror Group's pension fund as a personal piggybank and dipping into it to service debts that, because of high interest rates, were mounting by £3m every day. Yet he was such a persuasive character, so capable of pulling the wool over people's eyes with his larger-than-life persona, that few guessed there was anything wrong. In the three years before he died, the banks were still queuing up to lend him billions of pounds.
This is a story of hunger and greed, of a man who wasn't just self-made but entirely self-invented. Given that we all know how the story ends, Beacham's script is inclined to be all dressed up with nowhere much to go. But its trick is to offer up an unreliable narrator who bullies and flirts with us, manipulating us so outrageously that it is hard not to succumb even at the very moment when you are doubting the words that fall from his lips. Even the biographical information about his poverty-stricken childhood where there was never enough to eat, his escape from the Nazis with the help of a beautiful Gypsy and his early successes sound like something out of a novel.
Yet there was something about this charming bully that made people want to believe him, and Beacham's script plays the con-man psychology very cleverly. Its ace in the pack is a big, entirely convincing performance by York, who bears such an uncanny facial resemblance to Maxwell that it almost seems as if Captain Bob is back from the dead to haunt us.
· Until January 28. Box office: 0870 060 6632.
