REVIEW: REGARDING SHELLEY by Richard Bradbury at Upstairs at the Gatehouse 21-25 May 2025

‘Good idea, poorly executed’

Regarding Shelley has an interesting idea – the surveillance operation mounted on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and its effect on his life. It has its heart firmly in the right place. It has been written, directed and acted with love and care, and there are some excellent, well written and well-acted individual scenes in it. But as a play, it doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work mainly because it doesn’t have a dramatic structure. The events are related chronologically, and things happen. The Prime Minister, we are told, has been shot.  He was: in 1812 Spencer Perceval became the only British Prime Minister ever to be assassinated. But what difference this made to our protagonist’s life, we never find out. It is never referred to again.

A thuggish government agent assaults and perhaps rapes his wife Harriet in Shelley’s presence, and Shelley, to Harriet’s disgust, is too frightened of the man to try to stop him. Yet the next time we meet Shelley and Harriet, nothing in their relationship seems to have changed. The incident is forgotten, by the characters and apparently by the writer.

Links between scenes are provided by the government’s spymaster, Lord Sidmouth, which is quite a good device, but it is rather wasted because the things Lord Sidmouth says comment on the action rather than explaining it.

After I saw the play, I googled Harriet Shelley, about whom I had previously known nothing.  She was Shelley’s first wife, and her life and death are fascinating and dramatic, but here she is simply a foil for the poet.

This play is not irretrievable, because of the great dramatic strength of the idea. It runs for just one week at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, and then I hope the writer will take it away, give it an opening scene that tells us what iS going on and why we ought to care about it, make each scene follow on from the last, make the characters start in one place and end up in another, and place the state’s persecution of the poet in some sort of context. Then he could have a really interesting and magnetic play on his hands.

Riversmeet Productions present

Regarding Shelley

by Richard Bradbury

Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate

BOX OFFICE https://upstairsatthegatehouse.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173662750