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Oliver Cromwell and his highly Puritan government closed theatres in 1642 and they remained closed for 18 years. Yes, 18 years. Had I been alive then, how would I have survived? April de Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures registers that moment when the theatres re-opened and women were permitted to perform on stage for the first time. In 1663, actresses were a novelty. Up till then all female roles had been played by boys or young men. Now audiences came to see women in the flesh rather than to see the play. They wanted an erotic experience. The roles the actresses played regularly required them to disguise themselves as men and this enabled them to show their legs. They also took every opportunity they could to show their ankles and bare their breasts. The audience responded accordingly and treated them as the whores they so often were and heckled them (and not only heckled them). The excerpts from Restoration plays de Angelis uses seem wholly designed to show just how badly written and how badly acted they were and to get an easy patronising laugh. The scene which actually made the biggest impact, silencing the auditorium completely, was the most serious and uncomfortable one in which an actress had a failed abortion. The most famous actress of the day was Nell Gwyn, who began her career selling oranges and rose to become King Charles II’s favourite mistress and bore him two children. Samuel Pepys, the famed diarist, was an inveterate theatregoer and a great fan. He saw her in John Dryden’s Secret Love or The Maiden Queen eight times. Zoe Brough plays ambitious, pretty, witty Nell. Anna Chancellor plays Mrs Bettterton, who was famed for her Shakespearian roles and her sober virtuous life. At this point in her career, Mrs Betterton is no longer as popular as she once was simply because she is no longer young. Playhouse Creatures is a lot of chatter-chatter, often bawdy, often witty, but there is no plot to get hold of and the script rambles from scene to scene in bits and pieces. When it was revived in 1997 at the Old Vic, de Angelis added two male characters, the playwright Thomas Otway and the notorious libertine, the Earl of Rochester. Sadly, in the present production by Michael Oakley, they have been cut. I came out of the theatre thinking that it would be nice to see a genuine Restoration comedy. Am I alone in wanting to see a major revival of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife and Willliam Congreve’s Love for Love? Following its run at Richmond, Playhouse Creatures can be seen at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford and at the Theatre Royal in Bath. To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website.
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