Mr Foote’s Other Leg by Ian Kelly (review)

There could be no more appropriate home for Ian Kelly’s Mr Foote’s Other Leg(2015) than the Theatre Royal Haymarket, the stomping grounds of the play’s subject: the inimitable Georgian actor, playwright, and theatre manager Samuel Foote. After a successful premier and sold-out run at the Hampstead Theatre, Kelly’s two-act historical comedy moved to this small but lavish venue in London’s West End. In the eighteenth century, Foote ran summer seasons at the “Little Theatre” on Haymarket Street, acquiring a royal patent for the playhouse in 1767, after losing his leg following a riding accident. One of the many delights of this dramatic adaptation of Kelly’s biography (2012) is a meta-theatrical nod to the Haymarket’s debt to Foote, the proverbial founder of the feast. First and foremost, Mr Foote’s Other Legis a play about the theatre, “a peep behind the curtain,” as in the title of David Garrick’s 1767 rehearsal play. Richard Eyre’s direction apprehends not only vital truths about Garrick and Foote, celebrities who acted both onstage and off, but the essential theatricality of Georgian culture, explored recently by a number of scholars, including Felicity Nussbaum, Gillian Russell, Daniel O’Quinn, and Tracy C. Davis. The staging of Kelly’s play literally foregrounds the backstage of the historical Haymarket. Dressing room conversations unfold while actors casually don and doff their costumes; at several points in act 1, players go upstage to perform, silhouetted behind a scrim, their backs to us as they face an imaginary Georgian audience. The stage manager Mrs Garner (played with comic weariness by Jenny Galloway) reminds playgoers of the forgotten toil of backstage workers in the theatre.

Foote would likely approve of the playwright’s decision to act in his own play. Kelly appears in an amusing turn as Prince George, latterly King George iii. In an interview inserted into the program notes, the writer addresses many of the changes he makes to Foote’s life story. As both a seasoned actor and playwright, Kelly knows good theatre, and he intentionally sacrifices historical veracity in the name of entertainment. For example, he plays havoc with the period’s timeline to make a running joke about competing with Handel, who died in 1759, nearly a decade before Foote’s royal patent. Kelly centres much of his play on the friendship between Foote, the actress Margaret Woffington, and Garrick. The playwright was perhaps inspired by Garrick’s unusual living situation early in his career when the young actor shared lodgings with Woffington, who was his lover, and their mentor, Charles Macklin. Though much about the triangular relationship of Sam, Peg, and Davy is fictional, and indeed a bit clichéd, it does allow for some genuinely moving as well as funny scenes. Containing an enjoyable variety of dramatic moods and themes, Mr. Foote’s Other Legis “a high-seasoned Olio,” to borrow a phrase from the title page of Aristophanes, a book of the “Jests, Gibes, Bon-mots, [and] Witticisms” of Foote and several of his contemporaries (London: Robert Baldwin, 1778). Dervla Kirwan is charmingly crude as the Irish actress, and Garrick is played by the appropriately handsome (but overly tall) Joseph Millson, complete with the Georgian heartthrob’s famous dramatic pauses. Throughout Mr Foote’s Other Leg, much theatrical hay is made of Foote’s personal and professional relationship with Garrick, his “frenemy” at Drury Lane. The play gestures towards larger questions about cultural production in the friction between Foote and Garrick, who have wildly different conceptions of theatre. Their rivalry descends with hilarity into farce when they stage competing productions of Othello: Garrick’s tragedy versus Foote’s comedy. Kelly’s script underlines Garrick’s vanity, conservatism, and his devotion to Shakespeare, which was tied to his investment in raising the status of acting as a profession. Millson has a tendency, however, to oversimplify the “English Roscius,” with his...