“But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” – A hackneyed opening, but I’m unlikely ever to get another chance to use it so fittingly. Moreover, it is about as funny as anything actually in Tom Taylor’s comedy, which Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated in 1865. Put it this way: John Wilkes Booth, an accomplished actor, deliberately chose one of the play’s biggest laugh lines in the hope of drowning out the gunshot. That line was “You sockdologising old man-trap!” Oh, my aching sides.

The plot concerns a supposedly rough and ignorant Vermonter who, on visiting the landed English side of the family, proves himself so astute that within barely two hours of playing time he has set up four marriages including his own, thwarted a wicked scheme to bankrupt his uncle-host and chivalrously given away his own inheritance, albeit to his bride-to-be. However, in all this there is surprisingly little for any actor to get their teeth into. Solomon Mousley sounds more Texan than New Englander, but he is after all playing a Victorian English stereotype of an American. Kelly Burke as his spirited cousin Florence and Olivia Onyehara as his beloved Mary come over by and large as plausible. The rest may as well be cutouts from cartoons from the golden age of Punch magazine (which playwright Taylor went on to edit).

Theatrically, the play is remembered principally for the figure of Lord Dundreary, built up into the comic star of the piece by original actor Edward Askew Sothern, much of whose additional material is retained in Lydia Parker’s revival (its first London outing in over a century). Yet Dundreary’s comic riffs largely consist of inane wordplay (such as confusing “wings” with “wigs”). Sothern’s trademark exuberant whiskers also became known as Dundrearies, and so Timothy Allsop here has to spend the evening not only cracking the kind of puns that would be scorned by an eight-year-old but doing so from between what look like a couple of offcuts of coir matting glued to his cheeks. The production’s brief run has entirely sold out on its historical-curio value; it would never do so on grounds of entertainment.
  
Written for the Financial Times.