Too often, though, if you were to glance at the related passages in the book, you’d see that what has been lost in translation is a dry, subtle, keenly observing wit the grass is genuinely Greener on the other side.

What the production, directed by Abigail Pickard Price, offers in spades is the sensuous feel of Cuban life in the score’s syncopated Latin rhythms and the carnivalesque quality of the six actor-musicians ducking and diving about the tiny Watermill stage. Pat lyrics aren’t an inherent sin, and allowances can be made if the musical gains are sufficient. “My marriage got the best of me, my daughter wants the rest of me,” no less neatly observes the fusty burnt-out case, in a corresponding, wistful number – Used To Being Used – which any put-upon or over-drawn parent will relate to. “Father you scrimp, father you save, you can’t take it all to the grave,” Milly neatly warbles here, as she declares her insurmountable desire to have a horse for a birthday present. Small wonder that when an MI6 operative called Hawthorne – played by Noël Coward in the 1959 film – makes an approach, temptation wins out. And, interestingly, the most pronounced aspect of this evening is the dynamic between Wormold and his adored teenage lass Milly, raised as a pious Catholic but fiendishly devoted to spending pater’s dosh. That work had at its centre a father-daughter relationship. Now it has been given a musical treatment by composer Ben Morales Frost and Richard Hough (book, lyrics), whose most recent endeavour was a family show called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, streamed during the last national lockdown. The book has made it to the stage before, in a touring production. feeling of it, the ludicrousness… the way people get caught up in it.” “The most brilliant book on intelligence that’s ever been written,” he raved about Greene’s 1958 comic novel about a Brit abroad in febrile pre-revolution Cuba – a hard-up vacuum-cleaner seller called Wormold – who’s recruited to the information-gathering cause but soon out of his depth, cooking up reports, concocting agents. He was equally enthusiastic about Our Man in Havana. He judged him “tremendously good at dealing with agents and working out cover plans”. Recruited to MI6 in the early Forties, Graham Greene was a natural spy – at least according to the journalist and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew whereof he spoke.

Our man in havana greene