Crikey. Pitlochry has gone meta crazy. Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days is playing alongside the world premiere of Martin Sherman’s bonkers brilliant tribute to Liberace, I’ll Be Seeing You.

Fra Fee takes to the stage wearing bumblebee socks, and in furious voice. He’s desperately hungover. He’s had a weekend of intense gay sexual encounters and he’s been commissioned by some ‘theatre in the Highlands of Scotland’ to write a play about Liberace. ‘I hate Liberace,’ he grumbles.

Not long after, (Sir) Simon Russell Beale descends from the rafters on a flying rig. adorned with a silver wing-like cape. ‘Well, I’m well hung!’ he claims; the first of many naughty, and extremely camp lines that make this show a riot of hilarious indulgence.

Fee is ripped, shaven-chested and washboard-stomached, a real treat for Beale’s Liberace. This is not the sort of ribald, ferocious, outrageously camp-as-a-row-of-tents production that you’d normally expect to find in a theatre in a small rural town. This is Las Vegas.

Both Fee and Beale are wonderful. and accompanied by Anne Lacey, the only female cast member, who has a number of show-stealing moments, not least when she hilariously changes a monologue from Polish-accented to Irish. Simon Russell Beale is simply magnificent as Liberace. Really it’s hard to imagine the performance being enhanced any further than this funny, considered, thoughtful portrayal of a man whose public denial of his sexuality is the main theme of this loveable, joyous play.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is a shop window for queer theatre. Much of it excellent. But it usually suffers from production constraints. If only it were bigger. This is bigger. The whole of the queer fringe brought to life, celebrated and invested in. This is the Edinburgh Fringe, Las Vegas style.

The gambles Pitlochry Festival Theatre has taken this year in mounting exceptional technical productions, and tempting audiences out of Scotland’s big cities to witness them, is unprecedented. This feels like the biggest gamble of them all. Because you can’t do Liberace on a shoestring.

It’s hard to imagine how many more cats Alan Cumming is going to pull out of the bag (well, we have Ewan McGregor – SOLD OUT- next year) but these are sizeable cats (and don’t forget Siobhan Redmond is kicking it out of the park simulatneously in the Studio next door).

The writer, Martin Sherman, takes to the stage at the gentle, beautifully understated finale, in as meta a scene as you could ever imagine. It’s the icing ion a rather beautiful cake.

Special mention must be made of the technical prowess of the production. The lighting by Grant Anderson is luminous. The subtle sound design, with canned laughter at many points, is amusing, and the set and costumes by the Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s team are tremendous. And it’s all directed with gusto by Alan Cumming and Ben Occhipinti. What an enormous collective effort.

I’ll Be Seeing You is at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until Sun 11 Oct 2026