Simon Russell Beale's Liberace Descends on Pitlochry in Mid-Air

Simon Russell Beale makes his entrance in mid-air. Appearing some way above the stage at Pitlochry Festival theatre in a heavenly haze of smoke and light, he flashes a voluminous silver cape and a spangly waistcoat, his eyes wide and imploding as if he cannot believe it either.

It is flashy. It is flamboyant. And it is a problem for Fra Fee.

The vehicle is "I'll Be Seeing You", a headily meta new play by Martin Sherman, still provocative and unexpected at the age of 87. Fee plays a writer commissioned by Pitlochry Festival theatre to write a play about Liberace. The complication is built into the premise: he despises everything the American showbiz pianist stands for.

Beale, one of Britain's most decorated stage actors, takes on the flamboyant pianist at the Perthshire venue. Sherman's structure turns the biographical play inside out, making the struggle to write it the drama itself. The writer must confront a figure whose values he rejects, while that figure — capes, sparkle and all — refuses to be confined to the page.

The Guardian's review describes Beale's Liberace as "a life force too great to be tamed". The mid-air entrance sets the terms: this Liberace arrives from somewhere above, unbothered by the objections of the man trying to contain him in script form.

The production places a seasoned theatrical titan in the role of a showbiz titan. Beale's wide, imploring eyes and extravagant costume signal a performance pitched at the scale of its subject — a pianist who built a career on excess, from the silver capes to the candelabras.

Sherman, whose earlier works include the landmark "Bent", has long used theatre to interrogate identity and performance. At 87, he remains, according to the review, an unsettling and surprising voice, constructing a play about the impossibility of writing a play about someone you cannot stand.

Fee, an Irish actor and singer known for stage and screen work, carries the counterweight: the serious writer confronted with kitsch, sincerity at war with spectacle, and the question of whether an artist can capture a subject he holds in contempt.

Pitlochry Festival theatre, which commissioned the piece, continues its record of staging new work in the Highlands. "I'll Be Seeing You" runs there with Beale suspended in smoke and Fee wrestling with his assignment below.

The pairing of one of Britain's most revered classical actors with one of America's campest entertainers gives the production its central charge, and the review's verdict suggests Sherman has found in Liberace a figure resistance cannot contain.