CHARLES DICKENS, a lifelong ham, would have loved Rupert Holmes’s “Mystery of Edwin Drood,” now playing in a well-received Roundabout Theater Company revival at Studio 54.

The show is set in a Victorian music hall, where the actors, a second-rate touring troupe from London, are putting on their own, very hammy version of Dickens’s last, unfinished novel. Theirs is a world that Dickens knew well. From a young age he was stage-struck and for a while yearned to be an actor, not a writer. Even as he became an immensely successful novelist, he delighted in putting on amateur theatricals, usually starring himself, from his own scripts. And in his later years he became famous for the public readings he gave from his books both in England and in America. These weren’t stuffy 92nd Street Y sorts of evenings but dramatic one-man shows in which Dickens acted out all the parts with such passion that by the end he would be physically and emotionally spent.

The readings may partly explain why “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” was never completed. During the months he was writing it, Dickens broke a longstanding rule about not doing a reading tour while also working on a book. Already in poor health, and taking laudanum both to help him sleep and for pain in his legs, he exhausted himself and died of a stroke in June 1870, worn out at the age of 58.