'Publisher and Swindler". Ouch. These are the opening words of the entry for Ian Robert Maxwell in the Dictionary of National Biography. He'd have been pleased with the National' anyway, having been so conscious of less welcome labels - Czech, Jew - used against him, he felt, by the undefined Establishment which never accepted him. His own phrase, coined by a master-practitioner - "Lies have been told" - gives its title to Ron Beacham's play, which ended its current tour (surely not the last) in Oxford last week.

Rather sadly, there was the matter of falling circulation (not unknown to Maxwell newspapers) or maybe just a case of July Saturday sloth. The play - and the actor Philip York who's made it so much his own - deserved a fuller house.

We've come to hear the robber baron's life - and death -- story told on a bare stage furnished with three tables, one a clutter of electronic communication gear, one with champagne and caviar, one with newspapers, all getting snatched up and flung about at the master's whim. York, pulling off his town suit in favour of black T-shirt and slacks, assures us we'll learn "indisputable facts". Hmm. Secrets and lies, too - like the two versions of the wartime escape to Britain and the multiple names he assumed. Actually, the early years ring true - the family killed at Auschwitz, the Military Cross, the postwar meetings with publishers Springer and Butterworth, the banker Hambro and the founding of Pergamon Press when Maxwell was only 25. In fact, scientific publishing owes him much, as many leading scientists of the 1950s would testify.

There are omissions, like the "I'm Backing Britain" campaign, the interlude as Labour MP for Buckingham, and - though York does dress up in soccer shorts and England' shirt - no reference to Maxwell's bankrolling of Oxford United FC. We do hear, though, of his genuine love for his wife Betty, and pride in his home, Headington Hill Hall - the finest Council House in Britain, he called it - now enjoyed by Oxford Brookes students. But all the stress is on the voracious publishing acquisitions and the impossible debts needing £1m a day to service.

So, to 1991, and Maxwell has to play his own death. Theories are advanced and discarded. Pushed? Rubbish. Accident? No. Fear of jail? A bit. Weariness of the fight? Probably. "Too hungry, too long? Yes. So farewell then, RM, newspaper magnate and social climber. And what of that other RM, rival newspaper magnate and social climber, briskly referred to as "a privileged Australian turd" ? Still with us, I think.