J. B. Buckstone

John Baldwin Buckstone (14 September 1802 – 31 October 1879) was an English actor, playwright and comedian who wrote 150 plays, the first of which was produced in 1826.

He starred as a comic actor during much of his career for various periods at the Adelphi Theatre and the Haymarket Theatre, managing the Haymarket from 1853 to 1877.

Buckstone was born in Hoxton, London, the son of John Buckstone, a retired shopkeeper, and his wife Elizabeth (née Baldwin). He was educated at Walworth Grammar School and was briefly apprenticed on a naval ship at age 10 but returned to school. He studied law and was articled to a solicitor but turned to acting by age 19.

Buckstone first joined a travelling troupe in 1821 as Gabriel in The Children in the Wood. and toured for three years, mostly in the southeast of England. He found a mentor in Edmund Kean. He made his first London appearance, on 30 January 1823, at the Surrey Theatre, as Ramsay in The Fortunes of Nigel. In 1824 he joined that theatre and played Peter Smink in The Armistice with great success. He also began to write plays.

His successes led to his engagement in 1827 at the Adelphi Theatre, where he remained as the leading low comedian until 1833. Buckstone's acting was described as "a union of shrewdness and drollery, with their interaction upon each other ... was irresistibly comic." Buckstone wrote most of his plays in the first half of his career, and many of these were produced at the Adelphi. As his acting career reached the height of its success, his playwriting output declined. At the Adelphi, he appeared as Bobby Trot in his first really successful play, the melodrama Luke the Labourer (1827), which he had written in 1826. Other well known plays were Wreck Ashore (1830) and Forgery (1832) Perhaps the most successful of these early plays was his 1833 play, The Bravo, based on James Fenimore Cooper's novel of the same name.

He first appeared at the Haymarket Theatre during the summer season in 1833, also writing plays for this theatre, including Ellen Wartham (1833). Another hit for the Haymarket was the drama Thirty Years of a Woman's Life. At that theatre, his acting was praised in The Housekeeper by Douglas Jerrold (1833), Pyramus and Thisbe, and in his own plays, Uncle John, Rural Felicity and Agnes de Vere (all in 1834). He stayed at the Haymarket until 1838, producing The Dream at Sea among other plays.

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