Review by Michael Portillo of Lies Have Been Told by Rod Beacham at the Trafalgar Studios, for The New Statesman, January 2006.

Does the name Jan Ludvig Hoch mean anything? How about Ivan du Maurier? Or Leslie Jones? Hoch was the son of a cattle dealer born in Slatinské Dôly, Czechoslovakia in 1923. Du Maurier enlisted in the North Staffordshire Regiment two decades later. In between this impoverished Jew (for these aliases are all one person) had escaped from the Nazis, possibly heroically. Except for two sisters, all his family was wiped out. The young man fought in Normandy as a sergeant and in 1945 joined the Queen’s Royal Regiment and was commissioned. He became Ian Robert Maxwell and received the Military Cross, which Monty pinned to his chest.

According to his own accounts, throughout his childhood he went hungry. Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that as he became first a hero and a British officer, and later a very rich and powerful man, he was impressed by his own achievements.

In Lies Have Been Told, a one-man show about the late proprietor of The Daily Mirror, throughout the performance Maxwell pigs himself on Beluga, which he washes down with Krug. He tours the front row of the audience genially offering the public a chance to taste his £250 an ounce caviar. When at last someone accepts and lunges for the thickly spread blinis, Maxwell withdraws it. “Bloody well earn it like I’ve had to.”

The scene reveals some of the duality of Maxwell’s character. One of the play’s producers Dale Djerassi tells us in a programme note how kind to him Maxwell was over a long period of years. It began when Djerassi as an 18 year old student introduced himself to the tycoon in a restaurant, and was immediately invited to visit Maxwell’s Headington Hall mansion outside Oxford. But Captain Bob also terrorised employees with his bullying and vituperation.

So although you might think Maxwell one of the greatest villains of the business world in the late twentieth century, lifting £900 million from 30,000 pensioners of his companies, this play is no hatchet job. One reason may be that the work was the brainchild of Philip York, who now brings Maxwell to life on stage. He met Maxwell several times during the 1970s and suggested to writer Rod Beacham that he write this monologue.

During the course of the evening, we in the audience do not know where we stand with Maxwell. Sometimes he bellows at us to sit up straight. Then he smiles, and almost flirtatiously lifts one eyebrow to mollify us. He meant no harm after all. At other times we are almost weeping with him at the memory of his murdered mother, or gaping with admiration as he tells us how as a sixteen year old he overcame his Nazi guard with the aid of a gypsy woman. Then on reflection, we have no idea whether to believe a word of it.

York is flawless as Maxwell. He achieves an uncanny physical resemblance, though even with cushioning he lacks the girth of the twenty stone hulk who fell from his yacht Lady Ghislaine in 1991. York makes it feel as though we have been admitted to an audience in his office. We have been asked in so that he can put the record straight, because lies have been told about him. We are in his presence as he receives news from the markets, bellows orders down the phone and abuses staff. He humours us, takes us into his confidence, becomes exasperated with us, and finally teases us with conflicting accounts of how he met his end in the waters of the Atlantic.

Beacham’s writing is excellent. I found myself hanging on every word. He delivers a mass of information but the pace changes as often as Maxwell’s moods. Beacham’s Maxwell urges us not to be naïve. The world does not divide into good guys and bad, he tells us. If the company director who was described by the DTI as being unfit to run a public company in 1973 was later allowed to become the owner of a daily newspaper and a power in the land, it was because it suited many people, those who “could smell money on his hands and on his breath”.

The show spreads its guilt to the audience too. We enjoy it when someone else gets bullied or when Maxwell unleashes a stream of invective against Rupert Murdoch. We are gripped by a voyeuristic fascination to know whether finally Maxwell was pushed, fell or committed suicide.

The combined talents of Beacham and York make this a very entertaining evening. Maxwell’s charm works on us. His greed can be understood because of those long years during which he never had enough, and was gnawed by hunger. We salute the young hero and the self-made man. And when he stole, it was not to line his own pocket, but merely to keep his companies going, on which so many depended for their livelihoods.

This reincarnation of Maxwell almost takes us in. Fortunately, with the first breath of fresh air outside the theatre we pull ourselves together. Maxwell was one of the great crooks of his century. It takes more than a tough childhood to excuse his crimes.