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.

My Brilliant Friend

adapted by April De Angelis from Elena Ferrante's novels

seen at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames on 23 March 2017

Melly Still directs Niamh Cusack as Elena and Catherine McCormack as Lila in this two-part adaptation of the four Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, with a supporting cast of ten actors taking all the other parts. The set - an all-purpose and inventive use of the whole Rose Theatre stage and the galleries behind it - and costumes are designed by Soutra Gilmour.

This is a compelling piece of theatre with blisteringly good performances from the two women whose careers and experiences diverge drastically from their childhood in post-war Naples. The adaptation of four dense and complex novels into about five and a half hours of playing time is extremely ambitious, but it is triumphantly realised. It is clearly an adaptation from another medium, rather than a newly devised play, but nonetheless it is dramatically sound and intensely involving. I have not (yet) read the books, so I cannot comment on what has been sacrificed or simplified, but as a sheer piece of theatre I found it totally engrossing. I'm not entirely clear on the relations of some of the families - not helped here by the inevitable doubling of roles - but in the heat of the moment it was not much of a disadvantage.