How To Win Against History

This 10-Year Overnight Success Story is more preposterous – and moving – than the first time around

FULL disclosure: I would consider Seiriol Davies (responsible for the book, music and lyrics) a friend.

How do you review your friends? I try not to. Criticism is inherently personal — the most respectful way to review a friend’s work is to approach it as you would anyone else's: with care, thoughtfulness, and integrity. Or don’t bother.

Anyway. I do not believe that anybody could emerge from How to Win Against History unaware that what had just hit them was a masterpiece.

This hilarious meta biographical musical resurrects the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Cyril Paget: a dazzling weirdo who blew through a fortune ( around £200 million today) on gowns, jewels, and self-produced plays - starring himself- the aristocratic bad boy of his age.

Regrettably,” sings Henry Cyril Paget, “very little is known about my life.” Alas, as our Victorian nobleman tours his shows, next to nobody turns up. Certainly, nobody gets them, no matter how much he sings about wanting to be. His Victorian relatives were scandalised. In a furious act of erasure, they tried to scrub him from the family history.

Here, the three original performers are joined by four onstage musician‑singers.

During brilliant song ‘Please Everybody' (The Touring Song) where Seiriol Davies, with co-conspirators Matthew Blake and Dylan Townley bounce on top of a piano, sandwiching a flute player around each other as if magnetised.

Davies gives the Marquess his long-overdue revenge—a gleefully camp chamber opera of absurdity, screwball wit, and unexpected tenderness. There are other flashes of seriousness and thus clarity amid the hyperactivity of Lisa Spirling’s expanded staging.

Robbie Butler does fine work with the shimmering lighting. So much so that occasionally it is this rather than content that lingers. Yet there is a welcome lushness. Hayley Grindle’s tuneful set designs frame the action. A feast for the eye.

Most important, I cannot but marvel at the virtuosity of Davies’s book and score. It embraces grandeur and littleness in one gigantic clasp and changes gears subtly. All this is impressive. Iconic, and nearly canonic.

As I say, How to Win Against History both celebrates and skewers its subject.

“This is BBC One bliss. Olivia Colman could have been in this.”

10 years on, I think that How To Win Against History walked so that wartime musical Operation Mincemeat could run: this is a far superior piece of work, I think.

It aims high and catches the heart. As things draw to a close, eccentric Paget – who died penniless in Monte Carlo aged 29 – stands alone in the spotlight and sings:

“I was lonely / I was fierce / I was a cross-dresser / I was one, I was one, I was that.”

Well now.

How To Win Against History runs at Bristol Old Vic until 12 July - after that, it’ll transfer to Norwich Playhouse and Edinburgh Fringe, Underbelly.