Our Man In Havana spy thriller spotted heading for York Theatre Royal

In a co-production with Malvern Theatres and new associate the Buxton Opera House, director Amanda Knott's cast of four will perform Clive Francis's witty, fast-moving adaptation of Greene's satirical tale of a luckless vacuum cleaner salesman, sucked into a dirty world of espionage and double agents when the chance to help out MI6 proves too good an offer to resist.

Set in 1950s' Cuba, Our Man In Havana is a subversive spy play with resonance in today’s climate of world uncertainty. The storyline not only mirrors Greene’s own real-life obsession with travelling, often to the most dangerous spots on the planet, but also other aspects of his life; his Secret Service work, his brushes with criminals, his constantly itinerant status, among others.

"After the success we had with Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt last year, the Greene estate offered us the rights to Our Man In Havana and we thought it the perfect accompanying piece to follow Travels," says Creative Cow co-founder Katherine Senior. "We feel we’ve taken the company to a new level with it: working with set, lighting and sound designers and a new team of actors to bring a fresh, new creativity adding to the audience experience."

Since being set up in Amanda's farmyard at Bickleigh, near Exeter, in 2007 in tandem with Katherine and producer Matthew Parish, Creative Cow have staged productions as varied as Eden Philpotts' 1926 romantic comedy The Farmer's Wife, Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt, Dickens’s Hard Times, Harold Pinter’s The Lover, John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, Sheridan’s The Rivals, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer and a new adaptation of Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 2015.

"It's a rip-roaring farce, it's good fun, but with an underlying seriousness," says Our Man In Havana director Amanda Knott

"Creative Cow was born on a farm, hence the name," says Amanda. "Our first rehearsal took place in a cowshed in the summertime, when the White Park cows would walk by as we rehearsed, thinking 'what are you doing?'! Our form of farm diversification might not be the most profitable but it's certainly a good way of using the sheds when they're not occupied!"

That said, Creative Cow now rehearse in Exeter rather than down on the farm. Likewise, the company has progressed from staging its debut show, Peter Shaffer's The Private Ear And The Public Eye, in an Exeter pub to a tenth anniversary tour of Our Man In Havana to 13 theatres nationwide.

"After we did Giles Havergal's adaptation of Travels With My Aunt, we decided we'd do another Graham Greene adaptation with four actors, a sensibly sized company for us," says Amanda. "Clive Francis's adaptation has been around since 2009 but he's revised it for us, just tightening it up here and there with a couple of revisions.

"We've chosen it as it's a rip-roaring farce, it's good fun, but with an underlying seriousness as a satire on the Secret Service, so it's not a Feydeau farce by any means."

Creative Cow's performance style for Greene's story is to "tell the story" first and foremost. "That's what you need to make clear, when you have four actors playing 20-odd characters between them," says Amanda. "As you can imagine, there are a great many scenes, so to change the scenes as smoothly as possible we have minimal furniture, as we segue from one scene into another at great speed, and we have lovely Cuban music from Havana to link the scenes too."

In the cast will be Michael Onslow, James Dinsmore, Charles Davies and Isla Carter. "With so many characters, the men have to play some of the women and Isla has to play some male roles too, which all adds to the farce," says Amanda.

Creative Cow Theatre Company in Our Man In Havana, York Theatre Royal, May 31 to June 3, 7.30pm, plus 2pm, Thursday, and 2.30pm, Saturday matinees; post-show discussion, June 2. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk