A SCANDALOUS WOMAN IN A STORMY WORLD
A distant thunder of naval artillery: against elegant panelled walls in Naples a bundled matron in a bonnet watches her flighty daughter toss her ringlets, finish a fan letter to her hero (ever your grateful adoring admiring servant”) and seal it with a kiss. “I know what you’re about” says mother, resignedly. .”Luring him here like a spider”.
So she is. Nelson has won the Battle of the Nile and fame across Europe. Emma Hamilton, beauty with a scandalous past, wants a bit of the action. Married to the elderly British Ambassador after being his nephew’s mistress, she has won her own fame as an artist’s model and performer in flimsy draperies “a la Grecque” striking classical attitudes. Playing hostess and, rapidly, lover to the hero is her next move.
I liked this a lot: sharp, humane, funny and elegant, as you’d expect from the playwright April de Angelis . She formerly had great fun with rackety Georgian lowlife in Northampton’s musical “Gin Craze”, and here picks up the energy of that unapologetically misbehaving time before Victoria clamped the lid down, especially on female adventurism. The first half, with Caroline Quentin as the drily concerned mother and her real-life daughter Rose as Emma, is slightly burdened with the need to fill in the history for those who know nothing about Nelson, as well as indicating Emma’s table-dancing past (“selling your tuppence on Brewer Street”). and illegitimate daughter. But it roars along, Quentin senior solidly funny and believably worried, her daughter avid for adventure and fame. Brief scenes with a manservant lightly fill in the politics – for Emma was no fool despite her dangerous ambition, and actively a political wife to the Ambassador.
Seventeen years pass between the two acts: in that void much has happened (Rattigan’s Bequest to the Nation might help newcomers!). The menage-a-trois with Sir William has shocked the world, though Nelson could do no wrong in public eyes despite his adultery and cruelty towards his wife Fanny. He has fought on and died at Trafalgar, asking for Emma to be cared for by the nation, but her behaviour , debts, and rising public disapproval have left her and her daughter Horatia, always officially a random orphan adopted by Nelson, fleeing the country, penniless. They lodge in a cheap hut in Calais, near to starvation. So now Caroline Quentin plays the stouter, drunker fading Emma, and Rose Quentin the resentful, irritated daughter.
Again, much comedy – think Edina and Saffy from AbFab, but on the skids and hungry: when she can get to her feet old Emma still attempts the occasional Grecian attitude and reminds her daughter that she was no mere decoration but a player, in her time – but there is real pathos in it. Horatia’s relatives in England are offering her help and a home; Emma, though maintaining the promised pretence that she is not her mother, is fondly unable to let her go and rather hopes the teenager takes the practical step of sleeping with the landlord’s son. The female sense of bond and resentment between them is strikingly evoked; ridiculous old Emma’s last dream of ships and farewells properly touching. And as the old woman observed in the first half, “”The world is kinder to boys. But someone has to have girls I suppose….It’s not a perfect world for mothers but we do what we can”.
Jermynstreettheatre.co.uk. To 7 october.
Rating four.
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