THE 1660’s AND ALL THAT: THEATRE REBORN
Oddly, for theatrecat it’s the second day running of enliveningly energetic female history. After six women told the story of Mary Wollstonecraft braving the French Revolution and sneering 18c intellectuals, back we go a century to see five more depicting the moment when Cromwellian gloom was dispelled , Charles II had the theatres reopened and let women act onstage. As we open, old Doll Common (an irresistible Doña Croll) reminisces about how the playhouse she works in used to be a bear-pit, the creatures exploited and whipped. In some afterlife she is joined by Nell Gwyn, also remembering. Then around them rises a whole world of women, backstage and onstage and aspiring, each from a different direction.
Here’s teenage Nell from her oyster-stall: Zoe Brough engagingly childlike with energetic ambition. She’s off to audition for the King’s Company but Elizabeth Farley (Nicole Saywerr) gets there first , having, in playwright April de Angelis’ reimagination, started out as a Puritan divine’s orphaned daughter, her rhetoric decrying the filth and scandal of theatre. They meet other real figures. Katherine Kingsley is Beck Marshall, blonde and assertive and sweary, and the magnificent Anna Chancellor is Mrs Betterton: wife of the theatre’s owner, seasoned star, offering magisterial advice to the younger ones (the angle of the head at ten to eleven has particular pathos, and ‘never underestimate the advantage of opening one’s mouth when speaking” ). We never see Betterton himself, though she is once seen pleading with her husband and boss to let the actresses have shares, and profit, not be mere hirelings.
There’s a heady sense of a new profession, beyond service and street trades, for the young, poor, female and brave, Nell talks her way in and, after missing a cue and ruining a scene, discovers that a wild capering dance with lots of leg can quiet the gale of hissing and bring applause and cheers. We see scraps of the work – absurd melodramas with breasty maidenhood tethered to a property tree, moments of Shakespeare, some Restoration nonsense with Sir Fopling Flutter, a wonderful pair of Amazon archers in Roman helmets crying “we have avenged thee!”. THey are riding the new craze, for “the town does not want to see fusty old men in squashed hats”, but lively young women, décolletée and sportive.
Tough life, though, even apart from the hard work and constant line-learning. Beck, falling out with a deceitful noble lover and shouting back at his gallery cries of “whore!|”, is attacked and smeared with excrement. The carriages, flowers and seductive blandishments of great men – King very much included – are tributes to good legs and saucy breast-work, not your level artistry. And as you age you’re not going to be a star forever. Old Doll remarks “I’m always the dead one under the cloak, or else I’m sweeping”, and gradually the skilled, loyal Mrs Betterton finds herself sidelined; at one point holding the broom while a young one plays Queen. But if the narrative arc is of Nell’s development into the thrill of hundreds of faces “looking at you, waiting”, and the seduction of royalty, it also tells the peril of femaleness. Her pregnancy showing, Eliza’s day is over. – “To be That Way on the public stage!”could lose Betterton his licence. There’s only the street now, and more skilled if squalid pretending. In a brief, sad sisterly moment the others try to abort her with a stage prop, a brooch. There is a different sadness too as Mrs B remembers the heady moments when it all began, and she defied the bishops in breeches-roles to play Iago and the Fool and Prince Hal to her husband’s Othello, Lear and Falstaff; and how when reduced back to female roles , so often as victim, she missed that power.
Michael Oakley’s welcome revival does de Angelis proud: it’s lively, funny, sharp-witted, oddly thought-provoking. And for all its revelling in retrospective overacting, it chimes as touchingly sincere about the backstage sisterhood of women who like the bears in the old pit were treated as “creatures”. It has a short tour: catch it here or beyond, see below.
Box office. Orangetreetheatre.co.uk To 12 april. THEN –
Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. 22-26 April. THEN
Theatre Royal Bath, 28 April – 3 May
Rating 4
theatreCat 