A Victorian Eye opened to great acclaim at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London’s West End on July 30, 2013.
Rory’s accomplished script is moving and poetic, with moments that genuinely bring you to tears.
Jane Watkins – Country Life
The play, written by Rory Fellowes (brother of Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes) examines the life and work of the nineteenth century artist Sir William Blake Richmond, R.A.
An academician and a society portraitist, Richmond was a mythic, mystical religious spirit in private, though scornful of authority: a great anecdote has him smuggling a persecuted widow past the Vatican police.
Libby Purves – The Times
This one-man show (in which I performed under my UK Equity stage name of Nigel Dunbar) was directed by Maureen Payne-Hahner. The action of the play sees WBR at the end of his life, packing up his studio and reflecting on his life and loves, his successes as a painter and sculptor, and his supreme commitment to his master-work – the mosaic decoration of the quire of St Paul’s Cathedral.
His immense Byzantine mosaics in St Paul’s (which appear in ghostly back-projection) met scorn from a rising generation in love with post-Impressionism, Picasso and Duchamp.
Libby Purves – The Times