Clive Francis' adaptation of Graham Greene's novel takes the last of the books the author described as 'an entertainment' and turns it into a frenetic farce which is, if nothing else, certainly fast-moving.

Within the space of ten minutes we can be transported from a sleazy Cuban bar, to a hotel, to a spymaster's office in London to an airplane flying over the Caribbean. And  the changing of location is rather leisurely compared to the quick-changes demanded of the cast of four, most of whom must take on the best part of ten characters over the course of an evening. Some might just last for a couple of lines of dialogue but still require a complete costume change - even if the cast didn't get plaudits for their acting, they'd certainly get them for sheer stamina.

Simon Shepherd is Wormold who lives in Havana scraping a living as a vacuum cleaner salesman. His daughter Milly (Beth Cordingly) is a constant source of expenditure needing everything from her own horse to a place at a Swiss finishing school. He is soon recruited by Hawthorne (Philip Franks) to become a spy by gathering local information to be communicated back to England. Wormold is initially unwilling until he hits upon the idea of 'recruiting' a number of wholly imaginary spies, each of whom will be paid rather handsomely by his handlers back in London. But the more people he 'recruits' the greater is London's demand for some actual intelligence which he supplies in the form of diagrams of fearsome weapons of mass destruction. Which, on closer inspection, look suspiciously like 30-foot vacuum cleaner parts.

So far it's quite an amiable comedy. But the mood darkens with the appearance of Segura (Norman Pace) who works as a government appointed torturer and has a cigarette case made from human skin. And soon real people are getting killed as Wormold's fictions somehow spill over into real life.

With so many minor characters and significant story developments, all played at a pace which could best be described as furious, it can get a little confusing. I think it's fair to say that some of the finer points of the plot completely eluded me. And, perhaps, some of the major ones. Although the staging, the theatricality of the evening, was never less than impressive, I'm not sure I was particularly won over by it. I felt that something based on 'an entertainment' should be more...well, entertaining. For a comedy it had few good lines and energy, no matter how skilfully deployed , is no real substitute for wit.

The cast are uniformly excellent whether, like Simon Shepherd, they've just got the one role or, like Norman Pace, they get to play everyone from a torturer to a nun to our own dear Queen.

Our Man in Havana is certainly an accomplished piece of theatre but one that seems to sacrifice depth of character and comic invention for its immaculate staging.  

The play continues until Saturday 7.
For more information and to book tickets view:
www.ambassadortickets.com/Theatre-Royal-Brighton