Bridging Oscar Wilde and James Bond, this is the amazing secret life of William Somerset Maugham, who wrote to 92 and his death in 1965.

Fabulous wealth flowed from Maugham’s books, from Hollywood, Broadway, the West End and television. The Razors Edge, Of Human Bondage, The Painted Veil, The Letter and Rain – just a handful of his classic novels, plays and short stories. But behind popular acclaim lay tragedy. Orphaned by eight, within a lonely boyhood, his reserve, stoicism, stammer and even his sexual ambivalence found seed. After a notorious marriage and bitter divorce, he made his luxury home on the French Riviera, entertaining the great and good, royalty, prostitutes, the literati, and his one great love.

Anthony Curtis, a Maugham biographer, brings the extraordinary panorama of his life to the stage; the stricken child, the student in Heidelberg, the doctor in Lambeth’s slums, the struggling writer in Paris, the stretcher-bearer on Flanders’ fields, the traveller in Gauguin’s footsteps and, incredibly, the international spy. Finally, after glittering success, the tragedy of a life ending in miserable paranoia and social opprobrium.

Under the direction of Chris Garner, Anthony Smee (The English Patient, C4’s The Queen) lays bare the remarkable drama of Maugham’s life and work.

“Anthony Smee gives a superb performance as the worldly expatriate” The Times

“Rare for a one-man performance, the evening is a theatrically satisfying whole – thanks to an almost symbiotic collaboration between writer, actor and director” The Stage