Review: TWO HALVES OF GUINNESS at Park Theatre

Stuart King 23 April, 2026, 11:07

Back when I was a young whipper snapper - which is considerably longer ago than I care to remember - I had a notion that I should like to emulate my hero Alec Guinness and become an actor. To this end, I began a correspondence with him, during which my letters were always addressed to his home “Kettlebrook Meadows”, near Petersfield in Hampshire. The exchange lasted for the best part of a decade and included (from him) detailed audition recommendations for RADA (to which he encouraged me to apply) written in his fastidious hand, often just as he was about to go onto the set to film a scene in various productions including Monsignor Quixote.

Two Halves of Guinness, Zeb Soanes, photo by Danny Kaan Zeb Soanes in Two Halves of Guinness. Photo by Danny Kaan.

Fast forward 45 years, and my hero has long since ‘shuffled-off’ and we come to Mark Burgess’s one man play TWO HALVES OF GUINNESS performed by Zeb Soanes and directed by Selina Cadell which after a successful tour, now lands at Park Theatre's large space for a run until 2nd May.

The retrospective composite of the great man’s life opens with his demure acceptance speech at the 1980 Academy Awards ceremony, where an Honorary Lifetime Achievement award has been bestowed upon him a full quarter century after he’d won the Best Actor Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai. TWO HALVES… then aims to elucidate elements of the actor’s uncertain childhood, career, war years, marriage and those darker aspects which never quite made it into the spotlight during his lifetime.

Guinness had been born illegitimate, yet for all the world was a knight of the realm and while I was growing up, was considered a quiet and dignified establishment figure, star of stage and screen and the especial talent which had brought Ealing comedies to life long before he’d rendered Obi Wan Kenobi a mystical father figure across the globe in the Star Wars trilogy. My adulation was unquestioning.

Losing ourselves in Soanes’ mellifluous intonation and meticulous gesturing, we are taken into his confidence and journey with the naive young Guinness de Cuffe as he rises above his mother’s lowly birth and willingly accepts the possibility that he is the result of a dalliance with a member of the monied Guinness brewery clan who attended Cowes week where she had been a barmaid. Much of the content of the play was covered in his 1985 autobiography Blessings In Disguise, as are his early experiences with kindly but insensitive John Gielgud and later elements relating to director David Lean’s manipulative behaviour during multiple film collaborations. It is the intriguing titbits which arise during the telling, which engross and linger in the memory, like his roundabout quizzing of Omar Sharif over cups of tea in his tent on the set of “Lawrence of Arabia” and the actor’s admission that he had used his son’s awkward walk (from childhood polio) to inform Colonel Nicholson’s unsteady return from incarceration in the Oven in “…Kwai”.

The rancour of being paid considerably less than legit Hollywood co-stars like William Holden, is always landed with a wry and humorous plop rather than any hint of bitterness and it is this quality which enables us to understand and set aside the extramarital homosexual indiscretions which Guinness kept under wraps during his lifetime and which are subtly alluded to in the title of the piece.

TWO HALVES OF GUINNESS plays 2 hours with a 20min interval and continues at Park Theatre until early May.