HOMAGE TO THE FIRST CELEBRITY DIVA
Last time theatre’s pre-Victorian glory days – silk breeches, rowdy audiences and Garrickian hamming – were celebrated on this stage was in 2015: in Mr Foote’s Other Leg by Sam Kelly, with a rumbustious Russell Beale. This time it’s a decade or so later: the century has turned with the final King George, and actresses were becoming respectable and idolized . So we meet our heroine Sarah Siddons at her peak of female celebrity, recreated. by April de Angelis and director Anna Mackmin from careful research and a wickedly sharp sense of our own time having seen an elephantine growth of that phenomenon. “How wretched is she” cries Mrs Siddons, as any celebrity might, “who depends on the instability of public favour!” Few could inhabit that personality better than Rachael Stirling: she gives with humour and reality a diva in a woman-thwarting society, emotional and defiant and romantic and sharply funny, a performer able to move between Shakespeare and melodramatic schlock with enough truth to carry it, and tough enough to play grieving mothers while actually being one herself (two infant deaths, two lost daughters). She had us from the very first moment before the curtains, delivering that East-Lynne style line at a husband’s feet: “Forget an adulterous wretch who will never forget you” , swooning, and being carried deadweight to a chaise longue by her irritated co- star, manager and brother John Kemble.
The play is a peculiar but constantly entertaining mixture of pastiche, theatrical in-jokes, feminist irony, mischief, absurdity and heartfelt reflections on the alchemy of dragging up yout real pain to transmit universal emotional truths, audibly, across footlights to a paying public. De Angelis uses the recorded facts of Siddons’ long career – by the time we meet her she is famous, painted by Lawrence, but afflicted with a spendthrift husband and no power, operating in a scratchy professional relationship with her brother Kemble who as actor-manager of Drury Lane is perennially anxious about takings – “I have to muddy my talent with business!” He is also unwillingly aware that she is not only the greater draw but the better actor. Dominic Rowan as Kemble gives it – in his “onstage” moments beyond the great swooping curtain – enough extreme volume and exaggerated hamming to shake the set’s halftimbered roof . His fancy leg-work is a treat, too: proper pre-Victorian dandyism. It is important to him to be master, but at the same time he is jealous of the female star who always gets to do all the suffering and win sympathy.
But in Angelis’ flight of fancy – based in fact on a real woman playwright Siddons favoured but never got onstage – , along comes Joanna Baillie, who has creatied a sensitively suffering hero for him to howl through. But she actually makes the hero’s sister the real power, to Siddons’ delight, for “what man has a notion of writing a woman with an aged above five and twenty or as a rational being?”
It gets taken off on the second night. Later, after doing a she-Hamlet in Ireland with some spirited swordplay, Siddons demands Joanna write her a female equivalent of Hamlet complete with “madness, grief, wit, love and fencing’. Joanna concurs, promising that the heroine “goes mad, but not conveniently and quietly with herbs”. It’s a take on Ophelia I shall treasure forever as the male Hamlets rave on. But meanwhile there is a real abused young woman driven by marital cruelty to Bedlam – well, never mind, it’s a sprawly plot.
But excellent fun, taking its element of bonnet-drama lightly, with brief narrative bits of of selfdescription by Siddons, in the third person as per stage directions, and a few diva cries to keep us amused – “Tour??? I don’t like dressing-rooms with buckets or anywhere north of Birmingham” had the first night whooping.
The ensemble is fabulous, Anushka Chakravarti bustling around as a put-upon maid doing the job to avoid marriage to a missionary, and three others doubling and trebling beautifully as the rest of the anxious, labouring, maverick world of theatre. Eva Feiler does some splendid gender shape-shifting from scuttling anxious playwright to fugitive madwoman and various chaps; Sadie Shimmin moves between lady censor in a terrifying black feather hat and a raunchy wench-comedy turn, and Gareth Snook is among other things the oiliest drama critic of any century.
Larks, sharp ideas and a sense of considerable fun being had by all. For, as one of the silk-breeched cast in Kemble’s company wisely observes, “The best way to survive in this business is to adore everything you’re in”.
Having lately watched the superb Sheridan Smith’s brave online interviews praising Ivo van Hove’s production of Opening Night , that rang out as one of the perennial and useful truths of the trade.
Box office. Hampsteadtheatre.com. To 27 April
Rating four
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