Simon Russell Beale shuffles across the stage, dances like a maniac, and apparently gets one leg sawn off.“It’s going to be difficult to top that in the second act!” his character Samuel Foote declares halfway into the show.At the interval of “Mr. Foote’s Other Leg,” there is plenty of discussion about the seemingly boundless energy of Beale, one of Britain’s best stage actors, and the new Ian Kelly play, having a limited run on the West End. It is based on Kelly’s own biography of the real-life Foote (1720-1777), an actor, mimic, spendthrift, comedian, and theater manager.The second half keeps up the pace, with Foote getting more reckless, outrageous and out of control by the minute.Foote, for those who don’t know, was one of the greatest lost figures of Georgian London, one of the most famous men of the time. He was an early celebrity. Cue much amusing musing on selling personality and if unfettered fame makes you crazy.The story of the man who flirted with debt and loved the theater is all the more apt being staged at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, the very institution he built up to win a royal warrant. (The play has transferred from the Hampstead Theatre.)Foote squeezes into many dresses, and his pantomime-dame style is as close as we get to a Christmas show. Beale looks like a larger-than-life Quality-Street chocolate wearing a bonnet. The social-climbing Georgian celeb has the ear of the future king, played by Kelly himself. Foote’s friend and rival is actor David Garrick, played by Joseph Milson with just the right balance of pomp and circumstance.They are also friends of Benjamin Franklin, which leads to one of the few missteps of the play: Franklin’s philosophical musings, references to looming American Independence and scientific advance (“liquid electricity”) slow the action with too many ideas packed in. The action otherwise bowls along, Richard Eyre’s direction is crisp and Tom Hatley’s set imaginative.Foote boldly turns Shakespeare’s “Othello” into comedy, calling it “much ado about a handkerchief.” Garrick is appalled, saying that Shakespeare is “all that stands between us and vagabondage.” There are plenty of theatrical jokes – “silence is so underrated on the stage.” Foote has a photographic-memory ability to learn lines – something Beale is no stranger to, having done many of the great Shakespearean roles, sometimes doubling up with overlapping shows.Foote, like many of these – Lear, Hamlet - was a perfect tragic hero himself, with the seeds built in for his own destruction. He loses his leg in a silly riding accident, he loses his health, and nearly loses friends such as charming actress Peg Woffington (Dervla Kirwan). The name Foote is the subject of constant jokes, of “not a foot to stand on” and much worse.Finally, both loved and hated, and with the press accusing him of being a sodomite - the Oscar Wilde of his day - Foote is forced to flee to France. He dies at Dover while escaping arrest, having been warned to get away while there is still time. Beale sadly signs off: “See you on the other side.” It is a downcast end to a comedy that in Foote’s time would have been called rollicking and rumbustious. One might still do so today.“Mr Foote’s Other Leg” is at Theatre Royal Haymarket, Haymarket, London SW1Y 4HT through January 23 2016. Information: mrfootesotherleg.com
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