Stage: The Trials of Harvey Matusow

Nominated Best Actor at the 2010 Brighton Festival, Robert Cohen has been invited to reprise his one-man show The Trials of Harvey Matusow at Upstairs At Three And Ten.

Written and performed by Cohen and directed by Ralf Higgins this is the age of McCarthy, as seen through the eyes of America’s most notorious liar. The strange yet true story of a man who, at the height of the Cold War, succeeded in the impossible by uniting America’s left and right – in hatred for him.

Once a keen communist, he became a McCarthyite supergrass, spent four years testifying wherever and whenever he could get paid to do so, then set the cat among the stoolpigeons by revealing the truth: he had fabricated almost all his evidence.

The play, set in the late 1960s, finds Matusow living in self-imposed exile in England, looking back on a journey that took him from post-war Manhattan to McCarthyite Washington to Lewisburg Penitentiary – and thereafter to a struggle for redemption among the underground art worlds of New York and London.

Writer/performer Robert Cohen was born in London, raised in Dayton, San Diego and Eastbourne, and now lives in Brighton. His previous roles have included Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs at the Edinburgh Festival, Stepan in the BBC sitcom Ideal, Bobby Gould in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow and Don John in Much Ado About Nothing at the 2011 Brighton Festival.

Upstairs At Three And Ten, 10 Steine Street, Brighton. BN2 1TE, Tuesday 8–Wednesday 9 November 2011, 8pm, £tbc