Lies Have Been Told
C central, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: Peacock Presentations

Shirley Dent

We want to see a bloody-minded fat bastard and what we get is a bloody-minded fat bastard.

Robert Maxwell plays with the myth of Captain Bob, both in the mind of the media mogul himself and in the eyes of the public. Public perception melds with the bollocks-melting front of the man to produce a Citizen Kane in an England football strip. Maxwell is a larger than life creation, a self made man and a media-myth in a world that, through Maxwell's eyes at least, is a "desperate scavenger's hunt for the best lies".

Maxwell is a strange mixture of truth and lies and this is milked to great effect. There is no real message, no anti-capitalist rant at the heart of this play: at one level it is simply good entertainment. But what comes across very strongly is Maxwell's simultaneous utter contempt for the people - "is there anything you people won't believe?" - and utter need for the people. This need takes a tragic-comic turn in the scene where Maxwell declares that if he can only talk to the people, then the News of the World shall be his. This results in Captain Bob being hissed off stage.

His reaction to this is par for the course: he seethes, he cajoles, he bullies, he charms, he tells stories. And what is fascinating about Maxwell, is, that despite all the lies, his is a truly fascinating story. A poor Czech-Jew who escapes Nazism and becomes a caviar-crunching, ball-breaking, fat-cat utter bastard with more front (literally and metaphorically) than Buck House, is a story to seduce an audience with. Maxwell teases us with this power of seduction. It is not just that we, the audience, will believe what we want to believe. But, at the end of the day, this production suspects, and exploits the suspicion, that we share the hunger for a better life that drives Maxwell like a demon.

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