Beneath the clever humour of this very funny play are several bleak stories, all focused on the powerful, randy, banausic but aggressively successful publisher Mark Mellon, and his spectacular fall from delight into delusion and despair. It is a tale told to a Woman's Institute meeting in  is it Cheltenham? Chipping Sodbury?  ah no: Chichester some time after the events recounted: the story of Mark Mellon's hilarious flight and horrible fall. By no means incidentally, it is also the story of publishing's change from a gentlemanly pastime to an unsentimental business, and its effects on those involved: a progress, or at any rate a movement, which follows a curve that in a curious and oblique way has the same shape as Mark Mellon's own trajectory. 
      The centre of this witty, complex and in its way harrowing piece is  as the foregoing makes abundantly clear  the person of Mark Mellon, the only character on stage throughout. The Mellon role is an extraordinarily demanding one, both in the range of emotion that it asks its performer to scale, and in sheer physical exertion. Simon Callow meets and surpasses the challenge brilliantly. He inhabits Mark Mellon with enormous intelligence and completeness, and portrays to perfection the character's successive epochs of experience - the successful, happy, coarse-grained publisher, the irritated father, the robust friend, the ebullient lover; then the man progressively succumbing to jealousy and stress, the broken neurasthenic, the humbled and diminished individual creeping back into the world from a mental hospital. 
      The tale has a classic feel to it  it is a Hogarthian progress after all  though it is not one premised on hubris or folly, but somehow suggests that an inexorable logic governs the career of a person like Mark Mellon when engaged in changing the world as Mark Mellon does. Such, at any rate, is the impression left by the interpretation Simon Callow offers, using the full repertoire of his truly remarkable skills as an actor and interpreter. The script seems be a protean thing in Callow's reading of it: he makes the story completely his own, and even with the framing device (the lecture to the WI) the plays within the play, not only the moving and tragic later episodes but the earlier farce-like ones too, are deeply convincing. 
      Callow is very well supported: Tom Beard is prodigious as four different characters, Lydia Fox is a stunning Samantha, Geraldine Alexander is a sympathetic and convincing Kate. But it is Callow who dominates and carries the show, and it takes an effort of concentration to realise that the whole cast, the design, and the direction, are working seamlessly behind his Herculean efforts and abetting them beautifully. This is a show not to miss: it is West End at its best, and above all it is vintage Callow.
AC Grayling