Knave, warrior, lover... Sir Walter Raleigh on the Brighton stage

Directed by Rebecca Vaughan, it follows company success with productions including A Christmas Carol, Lady Susan, A Room of One’s Own, Christmas Gothic, Austen’s Women, and Female Gothic. Now they turn their attentions to the Elizabethan explorer, sailor, dandy and warrior, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I’s favourite and James I’s knave.

As Andrew says, there is so much more to him that most people probably don't know. In a life spanning around 65 years, Sir Walter Raleigh achieved more than others might do in a hundred. He was a father, husband, writer, poet, adventurer, philosopher, soldier, tyrant, egotist, lover, traitor, alchemist, visionary, victim… and more besides. But it was the final chapter of Raleigh’s life that was perhaps the most daring, the strangest and the most utterly heart-breaking.

“I just happened to be reading a book about him and I thought I knew most things about him, potatoes, Virginia, tobacco and execution! But I read this book and I discovered that he was in the Tower for all this time. And that there was a whole portion of his life that reads like an Elizabethan thriller. He was originally sentenced to death but it was commuted and he sat in the Tower for 13 years and then James I didn't do that well with money and thought ‘Who can I tap for money?’ and people suggested Sir Walter Raleigh. The suggestion was that they sent him off to find some gold and if he didn't do well then it wouldn't matter because they didn't like him anyway. And then he comes back and he is sentenced to death again for other reasons and that was the death sentence that actually stuck.”

The more Andrew read, the more fascinated he became: “He was quite the Renaissance man. He wrote poetry and he fancied himself as an alchemist. He wrote histories of the world as well as all his diplomatic stuff and tyrannical war stuff. He did all these amazing things but he was also a family man who loved his wife desperately. But he was also unsurprisingly very, very ambitious and full of hubris. He thought that his way was the best and he always thought that his way was the right way. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. He was this mass of contradictions in many ways and just such a fascinating character.”

And as far as Andrew is concerned, it is certainly an advantage that he is now playing him in a play which he wrote himself: “I think one of the things that you have to do when you're writing a show is to try to make it as human as possible, and the best way of trying to do that is to look for bits of yourself and try to make some sort of connection. I'm doing the best that I can with the research that I have done but I've also tried to find a real sense of human connection, just trying to understand why he did the things he did and whether I would choose those options that he chose. In that way I think it's really useful to have written it as well. We're trying to make it's as real as possible but to also give it a sense of modernity.”