Playhouse Creatures

by April De Angelis

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 10 April 2025

When the official London theatres re-opened in the 1660s after an 18-year hiatus acting skills and traditions had been lost and there were no trained boys to take on the female roles as they had done in Shakespeare's and Jonson's days. For the first time women were on stage professionally, but it was not without controversy and what we would now call trolling.

Playhouse Creatures concerns five such actresses, the unimpeachable Mrs Betterton (Anna Chancellor), married to the important theatrical manager Thomas Betterton, Mrs Marshall (Katherine Kingsley), Mrs Farley (Nicole Sawyerr), Doll Common (Doña Croll) and of course the up-and-coming Nell Gwyn (Zoe Brough). The title "Mrs" was a sop to respectability, and did not necessarily imply the presence or even existence of a corresponding "Mr", while Doll Common was actually Katherine Corey, forever associated with a part she played in Jonson's The Alchemist.

April De Angelis has created a play examining the highs and lows of these women's experiences, including some amusing pastiches of the kinds of roles for which they became famous - there was always an element of ogling involved on the part of the audience, not to say outright harassment, and though actresses could be taken up by aristocrats and even the King, they could also be dropped and vilified. The play covers all these eventualities in episodes mostly based on historical fact (though there were actually two Marshall sisters).

The play seems to be the dream reminiscence of Doll Common, portrayed here more as a wardrobe mistress and long-term confidante of Mrs Betterton than as an actress in her own right. The irrepressible Nell bursts into the lives of the others with blithe insouciance and an astonishingly resilient self-belief. Mrs Fawley is not so lucky, her career effectively destroyed by an unwanted pregnancy. No amount of sisterly sympathy can overcome the social disgrace once Mrs Fawley quails at the awful realities of an abortion (in the intimacy of the Orange Tree I suspect most of the audience was relieved that she called a halt to proceedings after the first probe proved too much to endure).

Here directed by Michael Oakley, the Orange Tree stage is used to excellent effect as principally a backstage space where the actresses can confer, advise and support one another. The rowdy audiences are just noises off, and a dialogue between Mrs Betterton and her husband, in which she puts the case for actresses owning shares in their company, is all the more poignant for us hearing only one side of the conversation: this as much as anything reminds us that the women's world was totally circumscribed by male power just out of sight.

The Merchant of Venice (1936)

by William Shakespeare (adapted by Brigid Armour and Tracey-Ann Oberman)

seen at the Richmond Theatre on 9 April 2025

The most problematic aspects to modern eyes of The Merchant of Venice - its racism and anti-semitism - are confronted boldly in this re-imagining of the play set in London's East End in 1936 as the Jewish community there faced the increasing activism of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. The director Brigid Armour and the "first female Shylock" Tracy-Ann Oberman have adjusted and streamlined the play to fit this tense time not far out of living memory, and in doing so have shone a disturbing light on the play and the period.

In front of a backdrop representing the terraced house fronts of a typical East End street the play opens with a Passover supper celebrated by Shylock and her family and friends, with daughter Jessica asking the time-honoured questions (usually it is the youngest male child who performs this task, but none is present). It is interrupted by the first shouts of the baying mob, and then Shakespeare's text takes over with Antonio's world-weariness, his friends' easy badinage and Bassanio's importunity. For Portia's scenes a white gauze curtain is drawn across the back of the stage lending an insubstantial air to the setting of Belmont, but back in town it is always the East End, and there is little reference to Venice: Bassanio is even referred to as an Englishman.

Gobbo, the clownish servant who determines to leave Shylock's employ, is here Mary (Evie Hargreaves, doubling as Nerissa) rather than Lancelot, and there is no sign of the father met and hoodwinked in the street (no bad thing, as the scene needs to be exceptionally well managed in order not to be tedious). But the sense of Shylock's house being only a precarious safe place is enhanced by the encroaching Blackshirts: a drunken Gratiano (Xavier Starr) sporting the scarlet armband relieves himself against Shylock's door while shouting insults. No wonder Shylock urges her daughter to keep away from the windows, little realising that Jessica has decided to elope with Lorenzo.

In this setting, with misogyny added to the anti-semitism, and the jeering males increasingly colluding with the Blackshirts and adopting their uniform - even Antonio and Bassanio are wearing armbands by the time of the court scene - Shylock is all the more threatened and her "merry bond" a forlorn hope for some redress, ultimately forestalled by the legal nicety revealed by the young lawyer (Portia disguised) in court. The whole atmosphere of the play shows up the "Venetians" as an unpleasant and self-righteous lot, with the casual insouciance of their prejudices most in evidence in their treatment of Jessica. She is completely disdained by Lorenzo's male friends, and when she addresses Portia the latter rudely cuts her off (an interpolated exchange, I think): Portia is clearly an upper class anti-semite (and she has also evidenced an unpleasant disdain for the Prince of Morocco here re-imagined as a Maharajah).

In the trial scene Shylock's determination to execute the bond, followed by her utter humiliation, is loaded heavily with prejudice - the jeering of Gratiano at her discomfiture is particularly grating in this production - and she brokenly disappears from the scene by walking down in front of the first row of the audience while the two young lawyers persuade Bassanio and Gratiano to part with the rings which they swore would never leave their fingers.

Back in Belmont Lorenzo (Mikhail Sen) and Jessica (Gráinne Dromgoole) spar with their talk of past lovers. This scene can be played as a romantic and lyrical teasing between two youngsters in love, but nowadays it is often, as here, played to show a mounting unhappiness and strain between the two speakers. When the triumphant crowd returns from the city Jessica can hardly feel comfortable surrounded by black-shirted men. But the usual conclusion of the play - a perhaps wary reconciliation of the other two married couples after the debacles with the rings - is interrupted by the off-stage raucous crowd and a sudden collapse of all the characters into a group of doughty East Enders fighting off the fascists in the Battle of Cable Street, as described by Shylock herself.

This transposition on the whole works well, though some of the sound effects and silent projections of headlines and crowd scenes are a bit heavy-handed; the final account of community resistance is doubtless uplifting but has virtually nothing to do with the play. Of course some aspects of the play are sacrificed in order to re-shape it to the political scene of the 1930s. The emotional centre of the play rests on Shylock, a startlingly powerful performance by Tracy-Ann Oberman; we cannot engage very much with the fortune-hunting Bassanio (Gavin Fowler) or the frustrated if entitled Portia (Georgie Fellows), or even with Antonio (Joseph Millson) perhaps impossibly in love with Bassanio himself. The supporting cast are strong, but their characters are on the whole unappealing, a factor which is certainly present in the original play, but which is understandably highlighted here.