The real Henry Paget

Towards the end of this 90-minute musical comedy-drama, Henry Cyril Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, performs his butterfly dance in a Berlin night club. On his head, antennae bob (bits of wire with balls on top); from his shoulders flow long panels of cloth (marginally more exotic than his usual daywear of long, spangled evening dress). He flutters and swirls these painted panels about his person while delivering accompanying text: “Twitter! Whoosh!” Henry wants to impress another artistic British peer, Lord Berners, with his adaptation of American choreographer Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance. In this he fails – according to this story.

Little is known about the real Henry. His private papers were destroyed by his family after his death in 1905, aged 29, by which time he had squandered his vast inheritance on clothes, jewels and artistic enterprises. This show sets out to challenge the charge, made at the time, that Henry’s had been a “wasted life”. It does this with a hotchpotch of humour, fantasy, feathers, sparkles, cheeky rhyming couplets (“realness”/”penis”) and high-energy performances that made an earlier version a hit at the 2016 Edinburgh fringe and subsequently in London. Here, the three original performers are joined by four onstage musician‑singers.

The biographical framework is fragmented into an assembly of skits on empire, Eton and touring theatre. What makes this story of a spendthrift multimillionaire relatable is how it uses humour and pathos to give Henry’s feelings of isolation a universal quality. Under Lisa Spirling’s direction, Seiriol Davies’s Henry is a compelling compound of outer pizazz and inner fragility (Davies also wrote the book, music and lyrics), Matthew Blake deliciously delivers a multiplicity of framing characters and the overall tone is tempered by sardonic comments from piano Maestro, Dylan Townley. A winner? History will tell.

How to Win Against History Old Vic theatre, Bristol, until 12 July