Dramatic Depictions of Theatre Heavyweights

Following last month's post on theatrical historical fiction, here we review some plays based on theatre greats of the past.

There seems to have been a recent wave of new plays based on leading theatre personalities - Jack Thorne's John Gielgud/Richard Burton sparring drama The Motive and the Cue was a big hit for the National Theatre in 2023, Born With Teeth - depicting the relationship between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe - is now playing in the West End, and Ralph Fiennes is due to appear as Victorian acting legend Henry Irving next year in David Hare's Grace Pervades.

Theatrical depictions of virtuoso thespians is a theme that's been going on for over a century. Here are a few notable selections from the past...

David Garrick - T.W. Robertson (1864)

David Garrick with his wife Eva-Maria Veigel by William Hogarth (c.1757-64)

'He spoke as if his soul was in each word.' 

David Garrick was the star actor of 18th Century British theatre - we still have a prestigious club named after him and a statue in his likeness at Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

The play that shares his name, set in 1742, had its London premiere at the Theatre Royal Haymarket 85 years after Garrick's death. Far from biographical, David Garrick casts its namesake as a character in a light domestic farce. The entirely fictional premise is as follows:

Garrick is invited into the home of Simon Ingot, proud Director of the East India Company, whose daughter is due to be married to a rich heir. The daughter, meanwhile, has fallen in love with the theatre and is particularly smitten with Garrick. The actor makes a pact with Ingot to convince the daughter to marry the favoured suitor, while also letting slip that his own eye has recently been taken by a female stranger in the audience. No prizes for guessing who that stranger might turn out to be... 

During the second act, Garrick makes a drunken oaf of himself in front of the assembled nobility - destroying the formidable public reputation he'd formerly held, and affirming the general public's assessment of all actors being downright scoundrels. After he leaves, disgraced, it soon transpires that Garrick's drunken antics were all an act and he has since committed to a duel with a pub dweller who spoke badly of the betrothed daughter. I won't spoil it by giving you Act Three but suffice to say it's all wrapped-up neatly by the end.

A rarely-revived play today, its old-fashioned humour and melodramatic plot would probably not fare too well with modern audiences. Nevertheless, it was a big success when it debuted and remained a stage favourite throughout the Victorian era.

Charles Wyndham, a leading comic actor, played the title role in his theatre's inaugural production in 1899. There's a large, framed photograph of Wyndham in the role in the Wyndham's foyer.

Kean - Alexander Dumas (1836)

Edmund Kean by George Clint (1820)

'I feel that I am killing myself with this life of dissipation and debauchery. But what can I do? - how can I change it? An actor must be master of all the passions to give them their proper expression. I study them on myself, and therefore it is that I have them by heart.' 

Another exemplar of the London stage, Edmund Kean was the star actor of the early-19th Century - a statue of him stands across from Garrick in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane's rotunda.

Kean, or The Genius and the Libertine was first performed in its original French only three years after the great actor's passing. Its English-language premiere came in 1847. More insightful on its subject than the previous play, the plot of Kean is again a work of fiction and as much a satire of English manners as a biographical study.

The curtains open on an aristocratic dinner party excitedly awaiting the actor's arrival, his ignoble reputation preceding him:

'Kean is a very hero of debauchery and scandal! A man who prides himself in eclipsing Lovelace in the multiplicity of his amours...and runs about from tavern to tavern to come home at last oftener in other people's arms than on his own legs.' 

In a messy romantic entanglement, Kean is secretly attempting to woo the Danish ambassador's wife - also pursued by the Prince of Wales - whilst himself being pursued by a runaway bride whose life has been saved by the theatre.

The subsequent Acts play out in Edmund Kean's more regular habitats - the Coal Hole Tavern (legendary pub in The Strand where Kean founded the Wolf Club), his dressing room and even on the stage itself. Pursued by the police for unpaid loans and challenged by the cuckolded Danish Ambassador, Kean neatly manages to escape unscathed and is awarded a hero's ending.

There are glimpses of the legendary actor's volatile temperament - foregoing a performance because of a hangover, knocking out a boxer in a pub, feigning an attack of madness mid-performance - but I suspect Dumas' treatment would feel too sanitised today. Kean infamously kept a pet lion and was known to spend entire nights galloping around the countryside on his horse so it's a hefty spirit to bring to life in a play, not least a romantic farce.

Another success on its debut, the play has since been adapted for the screen, made into a musical and was re-penned for the stage by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1954. It was last revived in London in 2007, starring the late great Antony Sher as Kean.

Pierre: Edmund? He's just a man. 

Ira: Who acts like lightning. 

Pierre: And you are the thunder to follow. 

'Red Velvet', Lolita Chakrabarti

Red Velvet - Lolita Chakrabarti (2012)

Adrian Lester as Ira Aldridge on the cover of the Red Velvet playtext (2012)

'Something about velvet - a deep promise of what's to come, the sweat of others embedded in the pile. A crushed map of who was folded here.' 

Perhaps of all the personalities on this list, Ira Aldridge's story is the most worthy of being staged. An African-American hailing from New York, he was the first black man to play Othello in London and replaced Edmund Kean - the most celebrated actor at the time - at Theatre Royal Covent Garden after Kean collapsed onstage. 

Red Velvet opens in a Polish dressing room in 1867. Aldridge is given license to divulge his life-story thanks to an aspiring journalist who sneaks her way in for an exclusive interview - such exposition is sadly all too necessary due to his relative obscurity amongst contemporary audiences. The action then travels back to Aldridge's introduction to the company at Theatre Royal Covent Garden (our current Royal Opera House) in 1833. After a fraught rehearsal, the first half ends with a scene from Othello, a glimpse of what the audience saw. 

The reviews that follow Aldridge's historic debut are scathing, a depressing reminder of the level of racial prejudice in the 19th Century and tragic confirmation for the prior fears held by the more bigoted members of the company. He was dropped after the second performance.

Although Aldridge went on to have great success touring in Europe - even receiving a knighthood in Germany - the play's opening and closing scenes present him as a man plagued by feelings of failure. Lines from King Lear swirl amidst voices from his Covent Garden past as he whites up to play Shakespeare's tragic monarch.

He died whilst rehearsing King Lear in Poland, only months before he was due to return to his native homeland, the USA, for a scheduled tour.

Justifiably regarded a modern classic, of all the assembled plays Red Velvet feels the most realistic in its depiction of its time and subject, and consequently the most powerful on the page.

Nell Gwynn - Jessica Swale (2015)

Gemma Arterton as Nell on the cover of Nell Gwynn (2016)

'The people loved her because she was one of them.' 

Although capturing a similarly seminal moment of cultural shift in the theatre, the tone and character of Nell Gwynn is a world apart from Red Velvet. As Jessica Swale, the author, makes clear in her introduction: 'Primarily, I wanted it to be fun. And if it's a play that Nell would have enjoyed, that's enough for me.' It's unashamedly light fare, a broad comedy with bawdy songs, and a play that likely reflects the spirit of its subject.

The plot mostly takes place in the environs of the theatre - opening with a contemporary prologue written and delivered by playwright John Dryden. Appropriately, Nell Gwynn steps out from the crowd for her entrance, clapping back at a rowdy heckler. The first Act then follows Nell's meteoric progression from humble orange seller to lover of star-actor Charles Hart and subsequent favoured mistress of King Charles II.

Like Red Velvet, there's some consternation at the idea of subverting convention - in this case by employing actresses in the company - but Swale lightens this mood by having the fool of the play, Edward Kynaston, its foremost detractor. 

The action subverts historical accuracy at the end by having Nell Gwynn return to the stage after the King's death. (It's generally believed that she retired from the theatre in 1671 - over 10 years before Charles II passed away.) However, in accordance with the pervading tone of Nell Gwynn, it's understandable that Swale would want to end the play with a wholesome finale.

The final words are spoken by Nell, delivering the epilogue that she likely wrote herself and were most definitely the last words she delivered onstage -

'As for my Epitaph when I am gone, 

I'll trust no Poet, but will write my own. 

Here Nelly lies, who, though she lived a slattern, 

Yet died a Princess acting in Saint Catherine.' 

Mr Foote's Other Leg - Ian Kelly (2015)

Mr Foote's Other Leg (2015)

Foote: 'When I hear laughter, I know there is something rubbing against what they once thought was right. That's what I do. I annoy. And people laugh, and sometimes - not often but sometimes - someone thinks a little differently because they have laughed in a theatre, at a man in a dress, when they might have thrown bricks.' 

Our final subject brings us back to Georgian England with a contemporary of Garrick's - Samuel Foote. Described by the play's author as a 'one-legged comedy superstar' and 'the original celebrity impressionist', Foote certainly left a singular mark on the theatre of his day. Ian Kelly's play spans the majority of his life onstage - finding his feet in London, losing a leg after a riding accident, and the trial that ultimately ended his career.

An unashamed love letter to the theatre, Mr Foote's Other Leg takes several liberties with historical accuracy. In one particularly farfetched scene, Charles Macklin spends an interval giving elocution lessons to Garrick, Peg Woffington and Samuel Foote before returning onstage to fatally stab his co-star, Thomas Hallam, through the eye. This grisly crime did in fact happen but was committed offstage, and certainly not immediately following elocution lessons. Even the riding accident to which Foote famously lost his leg is falsified.

However, as its subject would no doubt have approved, this play foregoes slavish historical precision in favour of a raucous evening's entertainment. This reaches its apotheosis at the end of the first half - at the climax of a graphic, un-anaesthetised amputation, the curtain drops on the line: 'It's going to be bloody difficult to top that in the second act!' 

Kelly interweaves moments of scientific updates into the plot - the functioning of the human mind, Benjamin Franklin and the dawn of electricity. Perhaps an ambitious sidebar, this thread ultimately feels an academic distraction and the play serves its subject better maintaining the spirit of broad comedy. Until, inevitably, the laughter ended.

A victim of his time, Samuel Foote was an unashamed iconoclast who, like Oscar Wilde a century later, had his reputation destroyed due to a trial accusing him of sodomy. Unlike Wilde, Foote won the case but his career was nevertheless irrevocably over. 

Kelly ends the play with his hero facing the audience - no longer laughing but still defiantly standing.

Mr Foote's Other Leg opened at the Hampstead Theatre in 2015 before appropriately transferring to the Theatre Royal Haymarket - the theatre for which Samuel Foote won a royal patent.

'Born With Teeth' is currently playing at the Wyndham's Theatre until 1st November: https://www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/whats-on/born-with-teeth

'Grace Pervades' is due to play at the Theatre Royal Haymarket from 24th April 2026. Tickets go on-sale this Friday: https://trh.co.uk/whatson/grace-pervades/