Long before the unintentional bathos of Horace Smith’s ‘In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,/ Stands a gigantic leg’, the eighteenth-century actor, dramatist and theatre manager Samuel Foote knew the value of a good one-legged-man gag. Ever the opportunist, he used the misfortune of losing one of his own to gain new popularity, writing parts for himself as a unidexter, to use Peter Cook’s coinage. Amongst the many other delights of historian Ian Kelly’s biography, Mr Foote’s Other Leg (2012), is the revelation that Dudley’s Moore’s optimistic audition for the role of Tarzan (‘a role which, traditionally, involves the use of a two-legged actor’) may well have had its origin in Foote’s outrageous jokes.
Before his biography of Foote, Kelly had already secured a reputation as an impressive eighteenth-century historian with lives of Beau Brummell (2005) and Casanova (2008). He is equally well-known as an actor. Depending on your age, you’ll have seen in him the lead role in The Pitman Painters or as Hermione’s father in the Harry Potter films. He now proves himself unfairly multi-talented with this superb dramatic comedy, also entitled Mr Foote’s Other Leg, premiering at Hampstead Theatre with a starry cast. Eighteenth-century experts might expect historical authenticity and look forward to chuckling knowingly at droll period jokes. But this show is much, much more. It’s a terrific play in its own right – tight, pacy, compact, and above all, hilariously funny.
Kelly’s theatrical expertise allows him to play fast and loose with some of the historical facts established in his book. So Dr Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber, is given a delicious back story – an earlier career as dresser to the capricious Foote. Thus in a moment of pure farce, the slender young Barber (Micah Blafour) looks on bemused as Foote, chubbily got up as Othello, all boot-blacked and afro-wigged, confronts the elegant Garrick, ready for his rival production, in identical, though more elegant, kit.
The reason the present run sold out even before it opened is doubtless due to the casting of Simon Russell Beale as Foote. It is a part he was born to play. Stout and pugnacious in his tricorn and buckled shoes, he is a Gillray or Rowlandson gouty gent come to life. We see him backstage in the dressing room he shares with Mrs Woffington (exquisitely played by Dervla Kirwan) as he is laced into a gargantuan frock for one of his famous transvestite roles. He gives a little shrug of pleasure and then a demure smile as he becomes Mrs Cole, the Covent Garden procuress newly converted to Methodism. And that’s all we need. Russell Beale doesn’t turn her into a pantomime dame. It’s subtle and supremely generous acting. Where he could have stolen this and every other scene, he reins in. Thus the play throughout is a superb ensemble piece.
A sparkling example of this is the scene in which Foote, following an accident from an ill-judged bet, has his leg amputated on stage. He is strapped into a large chair – fortunately turned away from the audience – as everyone sets to work under the direction of the surgeon. (London’s most famous one, Dr John Hunter, played by Forbes Masson, does service for all the medics in the play – and why not?). Thereafter Foote is equipped with a splendid leather-gaitered timber leg, designed by Hunter and fashioned, we are told, by a puppet master.
The play presents the whole colourful arena of eighteenth-century London theatrical life, its triumphs and disasters, its politics and scandals. We are made keenly aware of the restrictions imposed by Licensing Act of 1737, and Foote’s cunning plans to bypass censorship. If he can obtain royal patronage for his Little Haymarket Theatre, it could join the two other Theatres Royal and allow him legitimately to stage dramas. In pursuit of this, Foote works hard to win favour from the Prince of Wales, the future George III. Kelly elides parts of the character really played by the raffish Duke of York with that of his more staid bother, the Prince of Wales. In the production, Kelly himself plays this King-in-waiting as a decent but naïve chap, desperately eager to smuggle himself into the troupe at Foote’s theatre. The music of Handel keeps us anchored in the period, and when suddenly greatness is thrust upon him, the new king must reject the Falstaffian Foote. The line ‘I know thee not, old man,’ evokes the fissure which has opened up between court and theatre.
At this and other moments later in the play, the mood darkens. Mrs Woffington consults the ubiquitous Dr Hunter and discovers she has cancer. In a strangely touching scene, Garrick (Joseph Millson) and Foote drop their perpetual point-scoring to lie on either side of the dying actress and comfort her with reminiscences. But Foote has his own private anxieties. We see almost nothing of his private life, although accusations of sodomy will bring his downfall. The play consciously evokes parallels with Oscar Wilde here. But we also see a man increasingly concerned that he might be going mad. The play subtly suggests something of the period’s interest in mental illness, and of course we have the youthful George III, with his repetitive ‘what-what’s’ to remind us where this will all end. Other allusions to the wider concerns of the period are shaded in during the course of scenes between Hunter and Benjamin Franklin (Colin Stinton), another real-life friend of Foote’s. We are on the brink of American Independence and questions of liberty versus bondage to royal patronage are clear.
Tim Hatley’s set is clever: Hunter’s shelves of anatomical exhibits swing into the shared dressing room of Foote and Mrs Whiffington. Franklin, coached by Foote, addresses the Royal Society from old-fashioned footlights (puns are unavoidable). The lighting here and throughout is imaginative as is the music. Mr Foote’s Other Leg is directed by Richard Eyre with a superb supporting cast of Sophie Bleasdale as Miss Chudleigh, Joshua Elliott as Mr Hallam and Jenny Galloway as Mrs Garner.
Mr Foote’s Other Leg is a treat for all eighteenth-centuryists, and is surely about to get a much wider audience.
The play was at Hampstead Theatre from September 14th to October 17th 2015 and thereafter transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket. For a complementary review of the production following the transfer, we recommend the website of former BSECS President, Penelope Corfield.