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Lifting the curtain on the struggles of actors
PLAYHOUSE CREATURES
Theatro Technis
THE dynamic between actors and their audiences has always been a complex one. When women first took to the London stage in the 1660s, public rancour was replaced with intrigue, delight – and demands.
In the licentious Restoration era, the early female players often furthered their careers – willingly or not – through the sexual patronage of the court.
Times have changed somewhat, but April de Angelis’s study of the precarious perch between theatrical goddess and ‘playhouse creature’ inhabited by 17th century actresses remains engaging and germane.
The stories and follies of real life historical characters “provide the sage” of the Tower Theatre Company’s all-female production.
Young orange seller Nell Gwyn (Lisa Castle) dreams of trading her saleswoman patter for the high-faluting prose of the theatre, while the new darlings of the stage Mrs Farley and Mrs Marshall bask in the adoration of their predominantly male audience and furtively borrow company costumes to attend dates with their suitors.
Nell will go on to become a celebrated actress and the mistress of King Charles II, but tragedy is not far away for the other players. Foolish dalliances with unscrupulous aristocrats spell the end of the two starlets careers, and the ageing matriarch Mrs Betterton does not cope well with the call for younger, firmer models.
Jill Batty is fantastic as the fading, histrionic Betterton, proudly instructing her protegees on the clockface school of acting posture: “despair is at five past 12, death by strangulation at a quarter past nine” and Celia Reynold’s po-faced old-maid, Doll Common, steals the lion’s share of the laughs.
Angelis’s script, like the theatre dressing room set, is a gleeful hodgepodge of styles and influences.
Historical fact rides shotgun with excerpts from Macbeth and Anthony and Cleopatra and works well, for the most part.
The original writing lays on the demise parable a little thick and has a few epilogues too many, but it regularly elicits humour and pathos in turn.
And the themes – of actors struggling to do what they love in the face of ambivalent, exploitative audiences, of the theatre perpetuating itself despite adversity and poverty – still resonate strongly today.
Until October 13
020 7387 6617
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