I bet most of the audience in How to Win Against History went home and Googled Henry Cyril Paget, fifth marquis of Anglesey. Did the bespangled hero of Seiriol Davies’s musical cabaret actually exist? He was born, the show tells us, in 1875 and was dead less than 30 years later, having run through his fortune. He liked to get himself up in jewel-encrusted frocks, converted the chapel in his inherited castle into a theatre, and toured the country doing a dance as a butterfly. His relatives were not pleased with him, and one obituary described him as a “strange and repellent spirit opaquely incomprehensible and pathetically alone”.
Well he was, if not exactly real, a historical character – who adapted his car so that the exhaust pipe sprayed scent. How to Win Against History both celebrates and sends him up. In front of gauzy curtains and fairy lights, Davies appears in a blue glitter frock, ballet pumps with yellow ribbons, a huge fixed smile and sometimes a helmet with wings. But the marquis is only part of the point. Davies’s orchidaceous Edinburgh hit, undergraddy but mercifully far from underwritten, has a go at the avant garde – Davies does a good long warble on one note – and a few elegant sniggers at the mainstream: “This is BBC One bliss/ Keira Knightley could have been in this.”
Declaring themselves determined to bring this recherché life to a wide public, the three-strong cast “want to be like pistons/ Following the path of least resistance.” Dylan Townley, with Eraserhead hair, knickerbockers and a long face, is doleful on the keyboard. Matthew Blake plays (and is) an actor – going from fruity Shakespearean delivery to telly slime-master. He’s both public school bully – taking the lead in what might be called the Eton Booting Song – and the cajoler of a rapt audience, holding out one placard requesting some tepid applause, and another requesting “the sound of one person clapping”. That one took a bit of sorting out among various spectators eager for a solo spot.
• How to Win Against History is at the Young Vic, London, until 30 December
