The Beau

Synopsis

The most famous wit and dandy of them all, the man who taught a generation of English men how to dress, friend and confidant to lords, ladies and royalty is preparing to receive the Prince of Wales. But Beau Brummel is not in Bath or Brighton or any of the other fashionable watering holes. Still more interested in cuffs, collars and creases than in matters of life and death, he is in a madhouse in Calais, determined to relive past glories...

Our Review:

25 May 2001

It's interesting how plays and the playwrights who pen them sometimes travel in pairs, even if it is by accident rather than design. A few months ago, the Donmar Warehouse revealed David Mamet taking a period turn and scripting a slyly epigrammatic encounter between two women and their maid in Boston Marriage; now Ron Hutchinson has also turned the clock back from his usual contemporary mode to script a no less epigrammatic duologue between a master and his manservant in The Beau.

In both cases, you can feel the authors' relish as the dazzling one-liners bounce off the walls and reverberate in the stalls. But do they inform the characters - or merely show off the playwright? With the Mamet, the suspicion was that the joke was on us; we were being taken by surprise by a playwright whose usual metier was far less restrained. But with Hutchinson's new play, the joke is for us; and also, of course, for the two actors who seize ...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 11 June 2001:

Sad, very sad indeed. You have both said everything really. Alexis Barron...

Read more and add your own review