Duncan Barford

“Percy is, indeed, a bold and engaging character, and I think that in Percy we can detect something of the artistic dilemmas Peake himself was confronting at the time. Percy is a natural actor, but happens also to be painfully shy, and so adopts the persona of the wild artist – October Trellis – after faking his own suicide, in order to woo Sally Devius. To bury oneself in a false identity, albeit to attain the object of one’s dreams, is indeed a kind of suicide or death. Peake’s pursuit of theatrical success, likewise, was at the cost of the fundamental fidelity of the artist to his own imagination.

Ultimately, Peake and Percy rip away “the little civilized twigs” and arrive at “the original branch/ Naked and unadorned”, succeeding in winning Sally as well as remaining true to his real identity. Sadly, financial success eluded Peake, and in The Wit to Woo, when it is considered artistically, his powerful, individual imagination is muted, and is only in evidence once we look beneath the play’s more conventional façade.”
― Duncan Barford

“Beneath the farcical veneer of The Wit to Woo it is easy to espy some of the more enduring and darker themes which habitually occupied Peake’s imagination.

First among these is the question of how one is to forge an authentic personal identity in the face of constricting social codes and conventions: it could easily have been Lord Titus, instead of Percy Trellis, who protests towards the end of the play, “Oh damn the whole affair. / Pale documents have trapped me. And now I am unable to exist.”
― Duncan Barford