"Mr. Foote's Other Leg", Ian Kelly

A brilliantly written evocation of Georgian England, London and its theatre, as could perhaps only have been achieved by an author who was also himself an actor. He writes with enormous skill and understanding, despite the challenge of portraying the talent of a comedian whose side-splitting performances were simply so topical and of their era that if quoted verbatim they are, as he acknowledges, no longer at all funny. Instead Ian Kelly manages to convey convincingly the effect they had upon Foote's contemporaries, and the performer's supreme talent as an impressionist - attending one of his hot-from-the-headlines comedy entertainments, with Foote himself playing multiple roles, must have been like an episode of "Dead Ringers" (one cultural comparison Kelly doesn't actually make, though it is very much his thesis in this book that this era saw the dawn of modern media and celebrity culture).( Read more... )