Macready! Dickens’ Theatrical Friend – Theatre@41, York

Writer and Director: Mark Stratford

Macready!is the very definition of a one-man show: “written, performed, staged and designed by Mark Stratford.” Not that the design is too complicated: four chairs and a mirror. It is an accurate and thoroughly entertaining overview of the life and career of William Charles Macready, the greatest actor-manager of the mid-19th century. The subtitle, though correct enough, does seem to diminish Macready by defining him purely in relation to his friendship with the great novelist.

Macready’s achievements are considerable, enough to justify terming him the father of modern theatre. His ground-breaking seasons with Helen Faucit restored many complete Shakespeare texts, notably King Lear, shorn of its happy ending. He emphasised the importance of detailed rehearsal and, perhaps most important of all, was an early advocate of naturalism in acting. Oddly enough all this existed alongside a thoroughly Victorian world-view: he regarded actors as disreputable ruffians and prized respectability and morality above all.

Mark Stratford’s approach is straightforward, but very skilfully managed, based upon a pair of narrators: Macready, full of voice and dignified of bearing, and Stratford, supplying links to our present time. He proceeds chronologically, beginning with Macready’s attendance at Rugby School during one of his theatre manager father’s bouts of affluence. A collapse in the paternal finances led to the end of Macready’s dreams of becoming a barrister; instead, as a teenager, he had to take over a theatre company.

Stratford vividly characterises the people Macready encountered. He suggests a slump in Macready’s fortunes in his thirties, but this is very much comparative. Essentially he moved fairly smoothly from provincial to (slightly belated) London star, though in those days only Drury Lane and Covent Garden were licensed for straight plays and Kean and Kemble were ahead of him in the queue. All this culminated in his time as actor-manager at both the licensed theatres.

Stratford gives due attention to the famous incidents in Macready’s life: the early devotion to Sarah Siddons, the rivalry with Edmund Kean, the knock-down fight with theatre manager Alfred Bunn, the infamous New York riots between followers of Macready and Edwin Forrest, the split (and later reconciliation) with Faucit over professional acclaim.

These may suggest something of Macready’s haughty and combative nature and Stratford makes that clear in his stance and the rolling cadences of his speech. It seems odd that such a giant of theatre should be troubled by jealousy, but Stratford brings out his twin objectives, sometimes contradictory: to be true to the text and the author and to be acclaimed by respectable Victorian society.

Reviewed on 12th April 2025