Journalistic convention prefers people to be summed up by a single word: “politician”, “writer”, “actor”. However, the historical figure who provides Simon Russell Beale with his latest stage role requires a string of designations. The Cornishman Samuel Foote (1720-77) was at various times – and sometimes overlappingly – a crook, actor, playwright, drag queen, satirist, campaigner and amputee. To these various nouns the adjective “disgraced” was finally applied when, in a premonition of what would happen to another flamboyant man of parts, Oscar Wilde, at the end of the following century, Foote foolishly entered into a legal dispute with an aristocrat, who responded by accusing him of being a sodomite, driving him to head for the