Ian Kelly is a sickeningly versatile chap. As an actor, he has appeared in the West End and on Broadway in The Pitmen Painters; as a historian, his biography of Casanova has won awards; as a ghostwriter, his work on Vivienne Westwood’s memoir has enjoyed a less smooth ride. Now he has adapted his 2012 book subtitled Comedy, Tragedy And Murder in Georgian London for the stage, and moreover appears in Richard Eyre’s production as King George III.

Kelly focuses on the one-legged transvestite comedian (!) Samuel Foote, whom he portrays as a “frenemy” of David Garrick, running comedies at the Haymarket Theatre in rivalry with Garrick’s Shakespeares at Drury Lane. When Foote has a leg amputated following a riding accident resulting from a frivolous bet, his career continues but he grows more bitter and less restrained, particularly regarding his sexuality, which proves his downfall.

Kelly’s dramatisation is largely faithful to historical record, although he takes some liberties by folding in characters such as Benjamin Franklin in order to incorporate more of the material which fascinates him. And what fascinates him is virtually everything to do with the 18th century and/or the theatre. We touch on political history, theories of electrical fluid powering the human brain, race, homosexuality and the culture of celebrity embodied at the time in theatre, as well as a mass of anecdotage.

If anyone could keep all these plates spinning onstage at once, it is Simon Russell Beale. He almost succeeds as Foote, particularly during the plump puckishness of the first act, before subsiding into his trademark astringent self-awareness, clumping around on a wooden leg in a variety of frocks with built-in embonpoint. Joseph Millson as Garrick and Dervla Kirwan as the Irish-born actress Peg Woffington head a likewise assiduous supporting cast. However, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that I was being fascinated because I was already predisposed towards the subject and that others might find it hermetic; the second act appeared to bear this out, in that the deeper and more serious the material grows, the less compelling and more impenetrable it becomes. Like its subject, it stands firmly on one side only.
 
Written for the Financial Times.