Playhouse Creatures: 'dream-like' play is 'lively, funny and sharp-witted'

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“April De Angelis goes time travelling again,” said Clive Davis in The Times.

Last year, her portrait of Sarah Siddons, a star of the late 18th century London stage, premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Now, a “vivacious” revival of 1993’s “Playhouse Creatures” – her drama about the pioneering women who were the first to be allowed to tread the boards when the theatres reopened during the Restoration – has opened at the Orange Tree in Richmond.

This is a fractured, “dream-like” piece, in which we eavesdrop on the women backstage as they discuss their lives and their work, and also see them perform in front of an invisible audience – which, channelled through the production’s “nuanced sound design”, sometimes responds with “ripe misogynistic abuse”. The historical figures are arguably one-dimensional. But the cast, led by Anna Chancellor as Mary Betterton, the “imperious” wife of a theatre owner, “invest their characters with so much passion and humour that you are content to overlook the minimal plotting”.

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The play is more a “snapshot” of a moment in time than a “coloured-in portrait”, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. Still, it is an “entertaining and enlightening ensemble work” about that period in the 17th century when the first cohort of female actors emerged and were “regarded simultaneously as trailblazers, renegades and oddities akin to dancing bears”. Chancellor gives a “glinting performance” as Betterton. Zoe Brough is a spirited Nell Gwyn. And there’s strong support from Katherine Kingsley as Mrs Marshall, whose affair with an earl has left her vulnerable to audience abuse; Nicole Sawyerr as Mrs Farley, a “soapbox Christian” turned actress; and Doña Croll as “Doll Common”.

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