19 – 21 March

Alec Guinness is making an acceptance speech following the award of an Oscar. Suddenly he is whirled away to a mystical place where a voice commands him to give an account of himself. That voice comes from his father, a man who Guinness never knew and who was never identified, thus creating a yawning gap in his own identity that becomes a recurring theme through all that follows.

Written by Mark Burgess and directed by Selina Cadell, Two Halves Of Guinness is a one-man show performed by Zeb Soanes. One man, but many characters, for in addition to portraying Guinness, he sketches in over thirty other figures.  Some are roles Guinness played, such as Fagin from Oliver Twist, and others are people he encountered as his career progressed, including a generously supportive Edith Evans and a rather waspish Laurence Olivier

In a dynamic performance, Soanes captures the distinctive timbre of Guinness’s voice, and succeeds admirably in bringing all the other characters to life, often with witty employment of a few simple props, such as when a bedroom slipper becomes a telephone. Mime is frequently employed to comic effect.

There are more sombre moments too, for his mother was a heavy drinker, and a particularly touching scene depicts the time when she left him abandoned in a church while she went off boozing.  Such incidents seem to have spurred Guinness to forge his own path through life, often with quite selfish determination.

Paradoxically, that undeniably ruthlessly ambitious aspect of his personality sat alongside a deeply reserved self-effacement that can make him seem an impenetrable enigma, a blank canvas on which all his many and various roles were painted.  Was he constantly seeking his own identity? If so, perhaps he found it when he first read the script of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  George Smiley, the epitome of self-effacement, proved to be a perfect match. In George Smiley, the ever cryptic Alec Guinness truly found himself.

A technically impressive show, with effective lighting from Michael Fox and a very clever sound design from Eliza Thompson, Two Halves Of Guinness is never less than engaging. However, there are times when it is too tightly tied to the chronology of Guinness’s life, and not all the anecdotes featuring characters like John Gielgud or David Lean add much to our understanding of Guinness the man. His bisexuality is touched on, as is his Catholicism, but a little more exploratory depth and rather less rigid fidelity to the step-by-step course of his career might have done more to reveal the psychology of the man behind the many masks

A Guinness Of Two Halves will be greatly enjoyed by those with fond memories of a glittering career that ranged from the Ealing comedies of the 1950s all the way to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Zeb Soanes’ multifaceted performance, very funny one moment and somewhat darker the next, thoroughly deserved last night’s long applause.

★★★★☆. Mike Whitton, 21 March 2026