It is a dramatic rise and fall - and the author, himself an actor, is about to take up the role in an off-Broadway production.But Beau was in no doubt as to his legacy: "I, Brummell, put the modern man into pants, dark coat, white shirt and clean linen. It was a theatrical performance watched by Brummell's acolytes, as his man emerged from the dressing room with armfuls of neckclothes: "Oh, these sir? These are our failures." Kelly elegantly charts the tale of this fashion icon - whose fame in fact rested on a subfusc palette of brown, navy and cream - from Brummell's affairs with Hester Stanhope and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to his disastrous failing-out with the Prince, his gambling addiction, and finally to exile in France, the dandiacal body spotted with syphilitic sores. Brummell, who by all accounts had the physique of a Greek god, was swathed in linen that had to be country-laundered to avoid soot spots. His legs were clad in breeches so tight that, as one lady noted, they allowed one to know what a gentleman was thinking. It would be worth reading this book for Kelly's chapters on Brummell's dressing routine alone. With royal patronage - and his family inheritance - Brummell entered his swaggering stride as the ultimate Regency metrosexual.
In 1794, Brummell got to know the Prince himself, a man twice his age, who had an equal obsession with clothes (Kelly hints at a homoerotic attachment, too). After Eton (where his sense of style was born, via the uniform of the ritualistic "Montem polemen") and Oxford, the young Brummell joined the Prince of Wales's 10th Light Dragoons, a regiment almost entirely designed to sport the dashing pelisses and silver frogging of a hussar. Although Brummell's origins were almost lowly - his father was a civil servant - he was born in Downing Street, where Brummell Senior served the Prime Minister, Lord North. But on the problems of post-colonialism, Breakfast with Mugabe offers serious food for thought.The New Work Festival ends Friday (0870 609 1110).
Ian Kelly's magisterial, utterly gripping life of George "Beau" Brummell is a parable for modern times. Kelly sets out the arena deftly, with a vivid evocation of Georgian London. This was an era in which shopping was the new entertainment, and in which style and celebrity (with the requisite sums) could make, or break, a man. There's sometimes an air of contrivance, and projection can feel over-theatrical. Over at the Swan, the actor, artist and writer Antony Sher adds a directorial string to his bow with an incisive, powerfully acted production of Fraser Grace's piquant new play, Breakfast with Mugabe. Months before the 2002 elections in Zimbabwe, Peric (David Rintoul), a white psychiatrist and landowner, is summoned to examine President Robert Mugabe (a sinister Joseph Mydell) who, in shades of Macbeth and Banquo, is being persecuted by the malevolent spirit of Josiah Tongogara, the man who had been tipped to be the country's first leader after independence.Confrontations between doctor and powerful patient are tense, darkly comic and, finally, tragic.
