The Truth About Harry Beck
Rating: 3.5/5
Venue: London Transport Museum's Cubic Theatre
Cast: Simon Snashall and Ashley Christmas 

How did Beck create the iconic diagrammatic diagram of today, and at what cost? To understand you need to meet Harry, and his wife Nora. Take a glimpse inside a journey of passion, a wife’s dedication and the living breathing network of the tunnels and train tracks in our capital. Embrace your inner transport enthusiast through a mash up of real-life accounts, uncovered anecdotes and seemingly unconnected facts (…with a peppering of fictitious characters).  

Harry Beck - a man many of us won't have even heard of, but Londoners probably use the tube map he is responsible for creating almost every day. 

Now, Andy Burden's new play at London Transport Museum's Cubic Theatre allows us to uncover The Truth About Harry Beck, told through the lens of he and his wife Nora's marriage, as we see his ideas come to fruition. 

Neatly explained through the three key rejections that shaped Harry's career, the play beautifully combines the more touching, and sometimes frustrating, moments of the story with amusing highlights and comedic notes, which had the whole audience laughing. 

A personal highlight of the show for me came near the beginning, with Harry's idea for a diagram (NOT a map, as we are reminded throughout) of colour-coded interchanging stations coming to life using ribbons from his wife's sewing basket tied to different corners of the room, thus transforming their living room into a colourful web of underground lines. This was also a scene for brief audience participation, which tested our knowledge of the positioning of some tube stations, and things quickly got competitive! 

Both actors shone in their roles, but special mention must go to Ashley Christmas, who seamlessly switched between Harry's loving wife Nora and a handful of other characters, often different men with a variety of regional accents, who were influential in her husband's career and attempts to get recognition for his designs. She convincingly switched between each of these with ease and her comedic timing was first-class. 

Simon Snashall also did a great job portraying a convincing Harry Beck, with the audience watching his excitement grow to frustration and eventual sadness at the end of his career. 

I didn't know what to expect from a play about the designer of the tube map, but there was so much of the story that I didn't know before. It's well worth a visit for an entertaining - and educational! - evening out.