The Trials of Harvey Matsuow

I went into this performance assuming that Harvey Matusow was a fictional creation of writer Robert Cohen used as a theatrical device with which to tell an actual story.
As I sat through an hour and a half of spellbinding narrative I became more and more convinced that Cohen's performance and writing was fiction hung on factual events. Imagine my surprise when, on getting home and Googling Harvey Matusow, I found every word was true.
Matusow was the product of Russian immigrants who fled to America to avoid Stalin and ended up an active member of the Communist Party. In 1950 he offered himself up to the FBI and provided information to them for a fee until he was booted out of the party and subsequently dropped by the Bureau as being of no further use to them.
Having developed a taste for being a mercenary informer Matusow then offered his services to Congress as a paid expert on sniffing out the proverbial Reds-under-the-bed that a paranoid America was convinced were all around. This was an expertise he didn't actually have but over the four years he was in the pay of various departments and courts he often unjustly ruined the careers of many people by taking money to finger them as Communists. He ended up being Senator Joe McCarthy's right hand man.
In 1955 he had an epiphany and renounced his lies, ultimately being jailed for perjury and, irony of irony, being blacklisted.
Released from prison Harvey turned to the Arts when, understandably, no-one in the world of politics would speak to him. In 2002 he died of complications after a road accident.
Robert Cohen's masterful play was originally performed in 2010 at the Brighton Festival and is a welcome addition to the Upstairs at The Western summer season. Cohen's previous outing in Leicester was in the acclaimed Hi Vis which will be performed at this year's Edinburgh Festival

First published in Western Gazette 
© Paul Towers 2/6/2014