Viking Theatre, Dublin

What can you say about an 18th-century man whose origins are contested, whose age was uncertain, whose legacy is contained in plays, poetry and anecdote, and whose life – as Gary Jermyn and Michael James Ford’s comic biography suggests – was a continuous performance?

Born on the battlefield of the Boyne in 1690 (or, more likely, nine years later nowhere near it) and living in London until the ripe old age of 107 (or probably 97), the one categorical thing we can say about Charles Macklin is that he was a consummate actor.

The wittiest conceit of Jermyn and Ford’s play, which they also perform as a two-hander, is that wherever history proves unreliable, they side with the taller tale. Framed as a wartime BBC broadcast, the imagined context not only serves as the bicentenary of Macklin’s famous debut as a radically new Shylock, it also makes it almost plausible that Jermyn’s Cecil and Ford’s Monty should wear tuxedos to work.

But if that seems a loose justification, it highlights the sympathetic sense of actors celebrating acting through contentedly artificial foley effects (coconut shells, the tinkling flow of liquid) or ironic self-reference (“Great script, by the way,” compliments their producer, Simon Coury, before they begin).

Ironically, Macklin’s great innovation as an actor was to avoid exaggeration, moving performance away from stilted conventions towards a more supple realism, and Jermyn and Ford tread carefully between an affectionate and reverent portrait. As Jermyn narrates, Macklin’s life is cosseted in plummy Shakespearean quotation or undercut with a comically created sound effect, as though reality and creation are indistinguishable.

Ford, who often represents Macklin, fluctuates between eye-bulging ham and a softer delivery.

That may be the most appropriate way to negotiate between Macklin’s method and his myth. That he killed a fellow actor during an argument by driving a cane through the eye, I had heard. That, overcome with remorse, he tried to sterilise the wound with his own tinkling flow of liquid, I had not.

But although the play is inclined to indulge certain excesses – repeated lines, an inconsequential air-raid interruption – while avoiding other aspects of Macklin’s career (his considerable volume of playwriting), it is at its most eloquent and sympathetic on the gratification of performance: “Flattered, intoxicated,” Macklin says of his triumph as Shylock, a performance he never surpassed. “I was Charles the Great that night.”

Whoever he was beneath the act and uncertainties, Ford and Jermyn graciously allow him another bow.

Ends tomorrow