Review: Playbox Theatre’s Restoration Season at the Dream Factory, Warwick, is full of poignancy and joyous escapism
Photos: Lucy Barriball
“Now we can say anything.”
Pray bear these words in mind for the next few minutes.
Presented by Warwick’s Playbox Theatre across two long weekends as single performances and double bills under the banner Restoration Season, Playhouse Creatures and The Country Wife take place within the same theatrical era – the mid-to-late 1600s – when King Charles II, back on the throne after the revolution and under the influence of attending plays during his exile in France, decreed, among many other things, that it was ok for female characters on stage to be played by actual women rather than by blokes in dresses.
Playhouse Creatures directed by Mary King is something of a metadrama – theatre about theatre – written by April De Angelis in 1993 and intimately focused on the precarious lives of five pioneering female actors at the King’s Theatre in London. The Country Wife, directed by Stewart McGill, is a bawdy historical piece written by William Wycherley in 1675, a full-on madcap satirical farce which lampoons upper crust society with particular attention to how husbands treat their wives and vice versa.
You could say the plays are two sides of the same coin because although Creatures can be sobering and Wife incredibly silly, both deal ultimately with the battle of the sexes. And both are stunningly brilliant; from the lavishly brocaded period costumes to the golden chandelier lighting to the proliferation of stupendous periwigs, these are spectacles of rare extravagance.
But for all their splendour, the dazzle on stage before us is seldom what it seems. While Playhouse Creatures provides an opportunity to salute the real life first ladies of the English theatre, it is unflinching in its portrayal. Mery Sutherland’s Mary Betterton is the matriarch, married to the boss male player who, like all the other men in the telling, is never seen nor heard. Sutherland plays her with immense sympathy and an admirable ability to belch on cue. The first half of the play displays a lot of glee – hammy takes on Cleopatra’s death and suchlike – the second half more sombre, Sutherland’s Betterton attempting to negotiate shares in the company for her fellow female actors and finally being laid-off by her other half for being too old for the roles, he anxious to get in amongst the young ones, the Restoration audience eager for more nubile flesh.
Torn between dedication to her craft, duty to her old man and a desire for her talent to be recognised in her own right, she carries a stately sadness as she submits to her fate. Tellingly her avowed favourite role is “the dark lady”, Lady Macbeth, who mans up when her partner starts to bottle it. She’s heroic in her perseverance, the inspiration to others such as Phoebe Roberts’ Rebecca Marshall, a firebrand who’s shed a marriage and wants for no master, calling out the earl who has used and slandered her with dire consequences – excrement rubbed into her hair, eventually branded a witch and hounded out of town.
Lyla McLeod’s Elizabeth Farley is a picture of pity as she runs the full gamut of bitter experience - a preacher’s daughter turned actor who’s wooed by the king, cruelly discarded, gets pregnant and dispatched from the company in disgrace after an aborted abortion, abandoning her baby and last seen attempting to make ends meet as a prostitute.
Her position as the king’s plaything is unceremoniously usurped by Abbey Elston’s terrific Nell Gwyn, a flighty, rude and saucy go-getting teen, a pleasing looker who has no problem at all with being a kept woman and whose achieved ambition to climb the social ladder from oyster and orange seller to actor is unashamedly sacrificed for the estate, carriages and soft down pillows bestowed upon her by Charlie.
Elston’s Nell is a buxom, earthy charmer, the utter opposite of Ottilie Lampitt’s exceptional Doll Common, an arthritic hag with a heart of gold who’s been around forever, seen it all and dispenses daft, crude wisdom through toothless gums with a Yorkshire accent.
The Country Wife is a greedier piece in that it employs at least four separate plots which entwine with one another to create an hilariously chaotic revel. So licentious it was effectively banished from performance from 1753 until 1924, it concerns the lewd escapades of Mr Horner, played with more nudge-wink indecency by Dylan Somanathan than should surely be permitted in polite company. He’s a leering schemer determined to have his wicked way with as many of his mates’ wives as possible to which end he has devised a fiction that, while in France, he contracted some manner of pox which has rendered him a eunuch and, hence, of no threat should the chaps leave him alone with their ladies.
A sly, slinky, shameless rogue, named for the cuckold’s horns, apt to proposition members of the fairer sex in the audience whenever they take his fancy, he’s a rascally villain matched for laughs by this production’s superstar fop Elliott Barlow as Mr Sparkish, a bounder who gets to sport the fullest, fluffiest and finest of all the wigs, talk more utter tripe than all the other idiots put together and strut about like a horny peacock. The crowd love him, his every entrance greeted with cheers. We can’t get enough of his puffed-up self-importance and his bellowing inanity.
Nathanael Saleh’s Sir Jasper Fidget runs him close for caddishness, a volatile knave who is as blind to the dangers of leaving his missus in the company of Horner as Sparkish is when he foists his fiancé upon Liam Browne’s Mr Harcourt, a straighter rake than the rest of ‘em.
Fidget’s other half, Lady Fidget, draws a sparkling performance from Jennie Beattie, a dominating dame with a rampant libido, a volcanic blush, a skewed sense of honour, a wicked swoon and a dab hand with a fan oft weaponised as a rapier aimed at the numbskull noggin or private parts of the predatory males.
She’s in competitive cahoots with a couple of ladies-that-lunch, Niamh Smith’s Dainty Fidget and Elysia Sully’s Mrs Squeamish, a pair of enthusiastic connivers also after a bit of the other, while Esme Fleeman is Alithea, Sparkish’s intended, chased but chaste and just about the only sensible one in the whole bonkers bunch. She’s taken her brother’s newly married bride, Celine Delahey’s rural damsel Margery Pinchwife, under her wing now she’s arrived a wide-eyed naif in London having been picked by Tom Lomas’ exquisitely pantomime paranoid old crank, Mr Pinchwife, because he thinks she’ll be too uncultured and stupid to cheat on him.
Delahaye is splendid as the excitable Margery, endlessly enflamed and enthused by her buffoon husband’s mansplaining, warning her off the many sins of the city. Horner is after her, she’s after him and I’ll warrant you’ve never seen a quill put to use so salaciously. It’s all roister and a roustabout but, as I said, all you see is not always what it appears. For all their vivacious virility, the women in Wife are treated as chattels, pawns in a game of macho one-upmanship between the blokes. That they’re wilier is as may be, they are still possessions who wish to stay comfortably possessed with a little bit of covert nookie on the side.Overall, you might reasonably assume that Charles II opening up the acting profession to females was a bold, altruistic libertarian gesture. Far from it, actually. As expressed in his edict, his motive was to avoid the eventuality that the sight of pretty young chaps in petticoats might well tempt gents in the direction of that most heinous of perversions, homosexuality. So the girls got a go on stage to keep the blokes on the straight and narrow, not to introduce any sexual equanimity into society.
Also, in both plays, lasses get to dress as lads. There’s a preposterously winsome sword fight between Nell and Rebecca duded-up in Creatures, while Delahaye’s Margaret is dressed as a fictitious brother by her cranky hubbie in Wife in the hope of putting Horner off her scent. This could be taken as a vengeful jibe at all those years when cross-dressing males denied women their rightful place in the spotlight but again, no. Far from a cheeky bout of mocking role-reversal, female actors were bunged into breeches to titillate the men in the audience hungry for a sight of thigh, calf and ankle which were customarily hid beneath an ocean of petticoats.
That’s why Playhouse Creatures is so called. Because, according to Doll, who equates their lot to a harrowing tale about when the theatre used to house bear-baiting, that’s all the actresses actually were – performing creatures for the men’s amusement.
It’s an actual fact that of all the new plays or adaptations performed in England between 1660 and 1700, nearly a quarter contained one or more trousered lady episodes. Make of that what you will but that’s why the moments when the women attain a little victory, no matter how fleeting or illusionary, it’s a cause for celebration. In Creatures, when Phoebe Roberts’ Rebecca Marshall carves an effigy of her abuser out of a candle and sticks pins in it, the ladies break into a spontaneously joyous version of the “hubble bubble” scene from Macbeth and, for one brief moment, they feel empowered. In Wife, there’s a grand bit where the trio of ladies in hot pursuit of Horner all come to realise that he has privately shared the facts of his naughty deception with each of them. At which point, instead of embarking on the cat fight the Restoration audience would surely have howled for, and in order to ensure the continuance of their carnal enjoyments while keeping their reputations unblemished, they agree to become secret “sister-sharers” of Horner’s physical assets which feels like a victory for them as well as an exhausting triple bonus for our lusty laddo.
Centuries on, it makes you wonder how much has really changed. Female actors still seem stuck between a cock and a hard place, casting-couched by the Harvey Weinsteins of this world against their will as an established – sometimes the sole – route to getting on. And then there was Junie Hoang who, in 2011, felt compelled to take entertainment website IMdB to court for publishing her age. Hoang, who had deliberately kept the fact that she was 42 a secret up until that point, said that the reveal was to the detriment of her career as it led to her being overlooked for and refused roles she would have got if Hollywood thought she was younger. Hoang lost the case but the interesting thing is that she felt compelled to keep the secret rather than join the growing number of other female actors who have been vocal about gender ageism, Hoang believing that such protests were futile in a world ruled by men. In 2016 IMdB was ordered by law to remove anyone’s age under request so tiny steps maybe...Both of these productions are gloriously entertaining, so much going on that it’s hard to take it all in. The Country Wife ends on a note of ambiguous jollification – the female Fidgets get away with their infidelities, Horner – thanks to the false testimony of Isaac Hope’s dodgy doctor – survives with his trick and pecker intact and Margaret learns to embrace the art of lying, so no-one really gets what’s coming to them, hypocrisy proceeding apace which results in a monster rave-up on stage soundtracked by Empire Of The Sun.As for Playhouse Creatures, remember “Now we can say anything”? Sounds triumphant doesn’t it?These are the play’s final words. They’re uttered by Abbey Elston’s Nell Gwyn to Ottilie Lampitt’s Doll. Thing is though, they’re both in purgatory. They’re dead.
It seems only death can finally deliver the gals out from under the yoke of patriarchy. Unless, of course, God really does turn out to be a geezer. In which case…
The second tranche of Playbox Theatre’s Restoration Season runs as follows:
The Country Wife - Thursday 27th March, 7pm; Saturday 29th March, 3pm
Playhouse Creatures – Friday 28th March, 7pm, Saturday 29th March, 7pm
