The Lyons Mail (play)

The play's backdrops by Hawes Craven used in the productions at the Lyceum were destroyed in a fire in 1897 at the theatre's scenic store in Bear Lane in Southwark.

[7] Cast of the 1893 production at the Lyceum Theatre in London:[8] In Act I we are near Paris in France in 1796 where the audience is introduced to the contrasting lives of the central characters, Joseph Lesurques, a rich and respectable self-made man who arrives in Paris for the wedding of his daughter Julie to her fiancé, the merchant Didier.

While meeting old friends at a café members of the gang of Dubosc, an escaped convict, thief and drunk also gather.

Lesurques is wrongly identified by Joliquet the tavern-boy as the robber of the Lyons Mail; he is arrested alongside Courriol and Choppard, two of the real criminals.

[9] In Act III Lesurques is on trial; his daughter Julie wants to call off her engagement to Didier to save him from shame.

Lesurques having been found guilty is in prison awaiting execution when Julie arrives and explains the case of mistaken identity, which is confirmed by Courriol and Choppard.

[9] The actor John Martin-Harvey, who appeared as Joliquet opposite Irving in the play in the early 1890s, later said of Irving's performance: Lesurques in his hands bore very little resemblance to a hero in melodrama; he was typical of all that is implied by 'middle-class respectabilty', though perhaps a trifle too distinguished, and might have passed for a younger brother of Doctor Primrose, whom he more nearly resembled than any other of his impersonations....

'[In the finale] it is hardly possible to exaggerate the savagery of Irving's performance in that scene, yet never did he overstep the truth of nature and degenerate into extravagance.

He emerged triumphantly from the ordeal of comparison in the great twin parts of Lesurques and Dubosc in The Lyons Mail, that picturesque melodrama which has been given a niche in dramatic fame far above its deserts by the genius of Irving the elder.

Irving expressed the hope that he had made the play interesting, both to those to whom it was new and to those who were familiar with it in the old days at the Lyceum, there was one great shout of "You have".