There can be no more appropriate authors than Ian Hislop and Nick Newman to write this celebration of the forgotten role of William Hone in the defence of the freedom of speech in Britain which the Editor and Cartoonist of Private Eye enjoy today. Hone was subjected to three separate trials over three days in December 1817 for the use of parody of religious documents to mock the Crown and politicians of the day. Hislop has himself faced many libel cases as Editor and therefore both understands the importance of the cases and arguments and how it feels to be in the dock. You can imagine the excitement they must have felt when they discovered the story and were commissioned to continue their playwriting collaboration which started with Bunch of Amateurs and continued even more successfully with the excellent World War 1 story of Wipers Times.
They first wrote it as a one hour radio play for BBC Radio 4 and have now extended it into a two act play for the Watermill but the transfer from Radio to stage is not as successfully as we might have expected. The basic tale is wonderful material; a penniless but witty writer and publisher, Home and his collaborator and drinking partner cartoonist George Cruickshank regularly entertain crowds in shop windows with their work and he sells his Reformists Register, not for revolution or profits but to change the establishment. The targets of the day are the bloated and lascivious Prince Regent, the self interested politicians in both houses and the corrupt judicial system which protects the establishment. He becomes a campaigner for the case of Eliza Fenwick, the dumpling murderer hung for allegedly poisoning her employers although they neither actually died.
