Tragic hero of Drury Lane

Robert Meakin is a writer and longtime newspaper diarist

WHEN IN DECEMBER 1862 the fresh-faced Frederick Balsir Chatterton arrived to manage the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the road to failure seemed clearly mapped out. The theatre was long associated with financial calamity: an embittered predecessor had labelled the once prestigious establishment a vampire that “sucked the lifeblood out of everyone”.

While Chatterton, just 28 at the time, would indeed one day go down in flames like those before him, his biographer Robert Whelan’s mainly admiring and rigorous account tells the story of a now largely forgotten man whose heyday saw the doom-mongers proved wrong. With upmarket endeavours at Drury Lane increasingly out of favour — it had been converted, among