This April de Angelis period drama feels like a great idea that could have been done better. To be honest, it could probably be done better by De Angelis herself: she was a young woman when it premiered in Leicester way back in 1993.
Her intimate drama about five of the most prominent actresses of the Restoration – that is to say, five of the first ever English actresses – feels like the sketch for a bigger and more detailed play that was never actually made.
Why revive it? Well, it’s an intriguing subject. More to the point, director Michael Oakley has pulled together this cast. Current Orange Tree boss Tom Littler has definitely upped the name quotient at the small but respected Richmond theatre since taking over last year. Anna Chancellor is a very decent get as Mrs Betterton, doting actress wife to Thomas Betterton, the unseen actor-manager of the Duke’s Company for whom the actresses work. Triple Olivier nominee Katherine Kingsley – last seen on stage leading the National Theatre’s Witches musical – is wonderful as the very tough, very bosomy Mrs Marshall. But it’s the less well know youngsters who really impress.
Nicole Sawyerr was excellent in last year’s art exploitation satire My Mother’s Funeral. Here she’s brilliant as the flighty, cunning Mrs Farley, who goes on what one can only call Quite A Journey over the course of the play. It’s not the biggest role, but it calls for pitch-perfect comic and tragic timing and she really does deliver.
The revelation, though, is Zoë Brough. It’s possibly the kiss of death for me to make big predictions about a young performer’s career, but she is absolutely superb as Nell Gwynn. It’s a tough role to play: the most famous actress to have ever lived that nobody alive has ever actually seen act. But Brough’s mix of unselfconscious gaucheness, joy in performance, and almost feral charisma is riveting, like a snarling tiger and an innocent milkmaid, both at once. I can’t guarantee Brough is on her way to stardom, but she is utterly convincing playing somebody who was, and what’s the difference really?
De Angelis’s play certainly gives some sense of the strangeness of the early days of women on stage, but the world doesn’t feel hugely fleshed out by either text or director Michael Oakley’s no-frills production. There’s fascinating historical context in the programme notes that would surely have pepped up the play if any of it had been included (for instance in the confused aftermath of the Restoration women just… started acting, two years before it was actually made legal). Five women’s stories in two hours including an interval is a bit of a strain: Doña Croll’s’s Doll Common doesn’t get much of an arc beyond ‘she’s the old one’. And biggest name Chancellor is fine but could maybe have had a bit more fun with the poised but insecure Mrs Betterton, forever grandly invoking the name of her unseen husband.
Having introduced us to these groundbreaking historical figures, it’s a shame Playhouse Creatures feels like a relatively minor piece of writing. Somebody give 2025 De Angelis a suitcase full of cash to expand it into a prestige miniseries! But the acting is superb, and that is surely the greatest tribute you can pay these remarkable women.
