As a US salvage company claims to have found the wreckage of the fifth HMS Victory and artist Antony Gormley launches his fourth plinth project – where 2,400 people will each spend one hour on the empty square in Trafalgar Square this summer – Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson may be gone but he is certainly not forgotten, writes Kate Finburg.

He will be resurrected in Gregor Truter’s one-man show, Full Nelson, at the Questors Theatre, Ealing, from April 10-11.

“It is an old-fashioned story about one man’s obsession with Nelson,” says Truter, a seasoned actor (you may recognise him as the man who tried to kill Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love and knocked out his brother, Ralph, in The English Patient), who also wrote Full Nelson.

The sub-title of the show is Fanny, Frigates, Fighting and a Funeral, which is a nice, alliterative way of summing up its content.

“It is a comedy and I employ an old-fashioned theatrical technique of performing. It is basically me and eight blackboards,” says Truter.

“I use the blackboards to illustrate battles, draw ships, and write rude things about Napoleon.”

With one in five (probably) of the country’s pubs named after the great naval warrior (there is, in fact, one right next door to this newspaper’s office), there is little that isn’t known about Nelson, something Truter has encountered as he has toured with the show.

“There are some Nelson fanatics around. People come from all over the country to make sure I get it all right,” he adds.

Does he ever put any deliberate mistakes in the show to test them?

“I make enough mistakes already,” he says with a laugh. People tend to just tut when I do. They really love Nelson and, on the anniversary of his death, they give parties and some follow the funeral procession from Whitehall to St Paul’s.”

Nelson died after being shot on HMS Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar and his was the biggest funeral this country had seen.

Full Nelson, Questors Theatre Ealing, April 10-11, 7.30pm (and 2.30pm on April 11), £10/£8, questors.org.uk