The Knight from Nowhere/ The Bells (Park Theatre)

The idea of this double-bill as a seasonal treat is irresistible to anyone interested in the history, or the art, of acting. The Knight from Nowhere is a 75-minute digest of the life and career of Henry Irving, the great Victorian actor/manager, and The Bells his breakout success in 1871.

After that momentous first night, on the way home in a hansom cab, Irving’s pregnant wife asked him if he was going to make a fool of himself like that all his life; he stopped the cab, got out, walked off, and never spoke to her again.

The incident is repeated in Andrew Shepherd‘s play, which has the great merit of concision and humour but the greater handicap of some acting so dreadful in Lucy Foster‘s production that you understand far too easily how Irving must have stood out as the prime ham in the charcuterie window.

At least Shepherd himself as Irving (and as Mathias in The Bells) displays a modicum of grace and vocal flexibility while looking nothing at all like the actor he portrays; he’s much better at conveying his humble origins, the hard years of touring, his tuition by Samuel Phelps, the star of Sadler’s Wells, as Hamlet, and his dealings with Bram Stoker (the author of Dracula was his business manager in his glory years at the Lyceum), Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry.

The smaller Park auditorium is fitted out in red plush, white muslin snow, candles and an offstage pianist, but the bluster and rhetoric of Victorian theatre is mistaken for a much coarser, lower grade form of coy expressiveness, so it’s very hard to glean what exactly Irving achieved.

Mathias, the burgomaster in The Bells, is haunted by a murder of fifteen years ago on the day of his daughter’s wedding. The three acts of Leopold Lewis’s melodrama are squashed into fifty minutes, with only the merest sketches of the famous set-pieces in the snow-bound hostelry but a lot of booming and gesticulation from the minor characters; one of them carries on like Simon Callow possessed by Brian Blessed, which is to say he’s a little too much.

In the most famous scene of all, the nightmare is unleashed by the intervention of a Mesmerist and it’s here that you realise Irving’s powers of psychological histrionics must have seemed revolutionary; by the time he played Hamlet in 1874, he was generally recognised as the greatest actor since Garrick and Kean, and his Shylock in 1879, with Terry an equally unprecedented Portia, his special triumph. Shepherd ends the show frozen on a plinth as Irving’s statue; there’s too much reverence, not enough explanation, in an otherwise admirable and attractive enterprise.

The Knight from Nowhere and The Bells run at the Park Theatre until 19 December.