Dick Turpin's Last Ride

Synopsis

Dashing horseman, daring robber, swashbuckling swordsman, adored by every woman, respected by every man. Or poacher, rapist, thief and murderer, swung from the York gallows in 1739. What do you want to believe? A dynamic new version of the life of Dick Turpin, the most famous highwayman of them all. Drawn from court transcripts, newspaper reports and eye witness accounts this is a real life adventure story from the eighteenth century. Moving at a rip-roaring pace, the play interweaves fact and fiction, text and song. You ll discover things about the man behind the myth that some wanted buried with him at York.

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 15 September 2011

The Game of High Toby. It sounds so romantic, doesn’t it? Conjuring visions of a velvet-masked and dashing highwayman, silken-clad and thoroughbred-mounted? Perhaps dancing in the moonlight with an attractive coach passenger and then gallantly forgoing his booty for this innocent pleasure? Wrong. Very wrong.

[Daniel O’Brien], the nom-de-plume of the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds artistic director Colin Blumenau, has fashioned a ballad opera – with a clever score by Pat Whymark which combines folk pastiche with a very contemporary sound – from the story of Essex-born Dick Turpin. Turpin was made into something of a hero by the 19th century historical novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who basically invented the central episode of the ride to York on Black Bess.

We meet Ainsworth (Julian Harries) defending his fiction against the criticism of a “all the facts and nothing but the facts” historian Thomas Kyll ([Richard Pep...

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