Writer: Samuel Pepys
Adaptor: Deirdre Shields
Director: Judy Reaves
“The most remarkable account we have of ordinary lives in extraordinary times.” This is how director Judy Reaves describes Samuel Pepys’ famous diary. Deirdre Shields has adapted the diary and spliced it together with letters and music to create a vibrant portrait of mid-17th-century London. The results are strangely spellbinding.
Edward Bennett plays Pepys and, despite an almost entirely static staging, manages to infuse his reading with the diarist’s own energetic zest for life. Pepys was only 27 years old when he started to write. Among the politics and violence, there are simple pleasures including, several times, a “pint of wine” in different inns. There’s lots of food: “a very fine dinner— viz. a dish of marrow bones; a leg of mutton; a loin of veal; a dish of fowl, three pullets, and a dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s tongue, a dish of anchovies; a dish of prawns and cheese.” Bennett’s ecstatic intonation as he says “cheese” is hilarious. Most days end with “and so to bed”.
“Music is the thing of the world that I love most, and all the pleasure almost that I can now take,” writes Pepys later. The show includes the song Beauty Retire, which the diarist himself composed “and a very fine song it seems to be,” he writes modestly. There are also ballads and love songs, hymns, carols, laments.
Baroque Soprano Grace Davidson has a hypnotically pure and beautiful voice as she modulates this range of sounds. She also plays Elizabeth Pepys, her first speaking role. Davidson’s singing is accompanied by Daniel Murphy’s atmospheric lute-playing, Nick Stringfellow’s cello and musical director David le Page on the violin.
The words and music are artfully arranged and pacy. Often a brief burst of Baroque strings is enough to set the scene. When plague and fire ravage the city, the combination of lighting, narration, haunting singing and music is exquisitely evocative. The musicians and actors wear white shirts in a vaguely 17th-century style, but there is otherwise little concession to set or costumes. Life in bawdy Restoration London, in all its dissolute deliciousness, is conjured entirely through melody and monologue.
Shields, Reave and their cast do not flinch from exposing the darker side of Pepys’ character. He leaves his wife with a black eye after a quarrel and forces his “caresses” on various not-always-willing women. By giving Elizabeth Pepys a voice, the adapter rescues her from her husband’s pages, where she was only ever referred to as “my wife”.
The musical elements of this unique show are outstanding and well-matched by the prose. Pepys’ diary is an extraordinary record of the times. “It may be some worth to record my own life,” he conjectures at the start. Alongside his lifelong attempts to make money (“My own private condition very handsome, and esteemed rich, but indeed very poor”), he catalogues the social and political upheavals of civil war, naval battles, corpse-strewn streets and blazing churches. This is an engaging mix of classic text and well-chosen music that combines to make a mesmerising whole.
Reviewed on 8 Oct 2026
