An extract from Mr. Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian
London (published by Picador, 11 October 2012, in hardback, £18.99)
So it was that Samuel Foote, infamous young crime writer and noted coffee-house wit, came to be advertised as ‘the Young Gentleman’ who would be making his début ‘for [his own] diversion’ and opposite his acting coach, Macklin. What is shocking is what they chose to perform. Macklin was to play Iago, and Samuel Foote, still in his early twenties, was to make his London theatre début daringly blacked up as Othello.
Foote had been in training for a year or more with Macklin, and it is likely he had been ‘tried out’ in amateur productions in the tradition established by Macklin with Garrick. Nevertheless, Othello was not likely casting. The imposing Moor, a man of war and of raging sexual jealousy, was to be played by a small, pale, twenty-something Cornishman, tending to overweight, of indeterminate sexuality but known around the coffee houses of Covent Garden for his ‘hey-hey-what’ punch-lined gags and his noted penchant for lace. Perhaps Macklin thought it was a useful challenge for his protégé. Perhaps he hoped to shine as Iago. Perhaps he and Giffard were particularly alive to the blood sport of live performance and the salivation of a live audience for pained celebrity, performing outside its comfort zone. It was announced in exactly the same style that had heralded Garrick’s début, though this time the venue was more daringly the Little Theatre on the Haymarket. Giffard and Macklin suspected they could draw a West End crowd with the notorious Mr. Foote. It was billed as:
A Concert, and After it Othello
Othello to be Played by a Gentleman Never Before Seen Upon the Stage … The character of Othello … will be new dressed after the custom of his country … No money will be taken at the doors, nor any person admitted but by printed tickets, which will be delivered by Mr. Macklin.
The evening also saw the début of Foote’s fellow student, John Hill the apothecary, as Ludovico.
‘How a man so exclusively comic as Foote, should [even] think of a tragic part as his debut!’ was beyond his friend, William Cooke. He suggested that maybe Foote had felt he could be both ‘lover and hero … the general pursuits of young minds’, merely out of ‘the rashness and arrogance of youth’. But there were worries from the outset. Macklin delayed the opening and put out that this was due to the ‘violent indisposition’ of some cast members. He later wrote that Foote had neither ‘the figure, voice, nor manners’ to convince as the Moor – but he must have had some mad faith that Foote could do it, or he would not have risked his reputation as drama coach and co-star. Word got out that all was not as it should be. The Little Theatre sold out.
The doors were opened at four o’clock on 18 February 1744 and footmen were ‘desired to come at half an hour after three to keep places’. The play started eventually, once the crowd had calmed down, at six. By the end of the second act Macklin pronounced to Foote that the evening was ‘little better than a failure’. They battled on through the final acts – it was an adumbrated version of the text – but Foote’s performance ‘was found to be too imperfect [even] for private patronage’. ‘He was,’ Macklin declared cruelly, ‘miserably defective.’ It could have been worse. John Hill, as Ludovico, was so scarred by the experience and the booing of the packed house that he returned to his apothecary business and did not set foot on the stage again for several years. He persisted instead in writing, prompting Garrick into uncharacteristically catty poesy:
For physic and farces His equal there scarce is His farces are physic His physic a farce is.
Foote, meanwhile, had discovered something for himself. ‘Though the generality of the audience received [Foote] with … indulgence,’ wrote one critic, ‘many of the first distinction cheered him from personal and family [sympathy].’ Utterly miscast in a role and play of grand complexity, he had made, at points, the audience laugh – and had found an easy complicity with them, based, perhaps, on their half-imagined intimacy with his dramatic back-story or some more complex relationship. People warmed to Foote on stage. Even in boot-blacking and wig, even with Macklin upstaging him as Iago, people watched Foote, and smiled. One publisher advertised a compendium of acting advice to be ‘speedily published’ for ‘the Gentleman who lately acted the part of Othello’. There were insufficient subscriptions and it was never published. What soon becomes apparent in the newspapers of the period is that Foote’s début, cited sometimes as a debacle or as ‘Othello, the comedy’, was far from a disaster – it merely put him off tragedy. A month later the production ‘with the Gentleman who lately performed at the Haymarket’ was still in repertoire, not only at the Little Theatre but even for benefit nights at Drury Lane. If forced to recognise that tragedy was not his metier, Foote nevertheless scored a partial success with Othello: a commercial and sort of Pyrrhic comic victory. He was persuaded consequently to try his hand at something nearer his own mien: Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh’s The Relapse. It was set to open on 9 April 1744. Nonetheless he was advertised as the Mr. Foote ‘who lately acted Othello’, which can only express some positive reaction on the part of the London public to his interpretation – however comic – of the Moor of Venice.