University News Last updated 28 September 2010
The work of Birmingham City University’s Professor David Roberts will be brought to life on stage as part of Birmingham Book Festival.
Professor Roberts’s biography of Restoration London's leading actor and theatre manager, Thomas Betterton, was published by Cambridge University Press in June. His one-man play about Betterton, A Respectable Actor, will be given a staged reading at the Library Theatre, Birmingham Central Library at on Tuesday 12 October. Actor Robert Lister, who is a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the BBC and the Royal National Theatre will be playing Betterton, introduced by a short lecture from Professor Roberts.
Thomas Betterton worked with all the best-known playwrights of his age and with the first generation of English actresses; he was intimately involved in the theatre's responses to politics, and became a friend of leading literary men such as Alexander Pope and Sir Richard Steele. His innovations in scenery and company management, and his association with the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare, helped to change the culture of English theatre. Professor Roberts's study, Thomas Betterton, The Greatest Actor of the Restoration Stage, unearths new documents and draws fresh conclusions about this major but shadow figure. It contextualizes key performances and examines Betterton's relationship to patrons, colleagues and family, as well as to significant historical moments and artefacts. The most substantial study available of any seventeenth-century actor, this new biography gives one of England's greatest performing artists his due on the tercentenary of his death.