But the great majority of the managers are men of noble intent and a heroic capacity for hard work. Colley Cibber devoted his life to the notion that the theatre was the highest mark of cultural civilisation; Richard Steele thought it was even more important as a source of moral instruction, which makes his writing for the theatre now unreadably pious; Richard Brinsley Sheridan valued his political career higher than his scribbling, but his plays are as witty and popular now as they were 200 years ago (his management marred, alas, by financial naiveté); above all, the saintly David Garrick, whose first performance as Richard III has ever been a pillar of theatrical legend, and one of whose last, as Lear, was so traumatic that Joshua Reynolds said it took him three days to recover from the experience. 

The next century was dominated by actors in the grand style — Edmund Kean, Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble. Not included in the book, but irresistible to me, is Mrs Siddons's inability to stop talking in alexandrine verse even when she went shopping, as in "You brought me water, boy; I asked for beer."

The dispute between those who would protect the intellectual integrity of what is presented on stage and those who would give the public what it wants, however trite, has reverberated throughout Drury Lane's long history. The popularity of pantomime, originally offered as an "afterpiece" to follow the heavier stuff, so grew that it threatened to overwhelm everything else. It was the wise Garrick who tamed the beast by embracing it, and established the tradition that the first panto of the season should be shown on Boxing Day. He also devised the famous jubilee to celebrate Shakespeare's bicentenary with a mixture of spectacle, dancing and fun, subtly borrowed from pantomime lore: "it allowed the audience to feel good about Shakespeare as a national hero without the effort of sitting through one of his plays," writes Whelan, very astutely. By the end of the 19th century, under the management of Augustus Harris, spectacle so dominated the repertoire that a special high access to the stage was built and named "the elephant arch"; it is still there, though the elephants are gone.

And so we are brought to the era of the big musical and My Fair Lady, with many an odd piece of information along the way. Of course solid history does not have to wear a solemn face, but I have never encountered a book which so artfully combines serious narrative with a frisky, even flippant style; it is risky, but on the whole Whelan gets away with it. He falters only when he introduces out-of-place colloquialisms, such as "up his game", "caught on the hop", "PDQ" (what?), "packing 'em in" (sic). It might be all very well to talk about "bums on seats" in the Green Room backstage, but please, not on the page (three times). And to write that the Restoration actress Mrs Betterton was "past her sell-by date", as if she were on special offer, is likely to mystify future generations of readers.