WHAT’S THE PLAY AND WHERE’S THE STAGE? A Theatrical Family of the Regency Era

The lives of eminent London actors of the Regency period - Kean, Mrs Siddons, Kemble, Cooke, Macready, Grimaldi et al are more than amply recorded. This book ploughs a more unusual, rarer, furrow. It reveals the theatrical lives of a family of provincial players who tramped the highways and byways bringing the latest London hits and classic plays to unsophisticated audiences in tiny country theatres and large manufacturing towns. The author offers not a specialist tome for theatre historians - although they will find previously unknown material and new revelations here - but a beguiling story of a family of three thespian siblings, their spouses and their children. This is a Regency world far removed from the novels of Jane Austen. There are highs and lows, riches and poverty, twists and turns, and extraordinary events as in the script of any modern television saga. The marked difference being that - for the Jonas and Penley Company of Comedians - this was real life.