Reviews

The Daily Telegraph

Chichester’s temporary summer venue, the Theatre on the Fly, is a rough-and-ready structure whose interior, a complexity of ropes and pulleys, lays bare the machinery of illusion. So too does Playhouse Creatures, a new work by April de Angelis. Indeed theatre and play have found their perfect match: this is an evening that makes of unvarnished truth something truly magical.

The play is set in 1663, as actresses were first being introduced to the stage. The stunning cast play four female performers, including the young Nell Gwyn and the ageing Mary Betterton, whose actor husband manages the theatre in which the action is set. There is also a general helpmeet, Doll Common, a chorus figure with a vigorous cockney delivery and, as played by the great Susan Tracy, an intense capacity to move.

Tracy’s is an astounding performance. When she gives her defining speech, describing how Betterton’s theatre was formerly a bear pit, and how as a child she watched her father rip the claws from an aggressive female dancing bear, you understand the analogy with Restoration playhouses – that the actresses were ’creatures’ who would be tamed if they stepped out of line – but you also feel the whole life of this sad, droll woman.

Doll has learned, the hard way, that the world deals cruelly with transgression from the female ’norm’. Mrs Betterton, played exquisitely by Alexandra Gilbreath, is sacked – by her own husband – because audiences want to see younger flesh. Beautiful, susceptible Elizabeth (Fiona Hampton) undergoes a gruesome abortion in an attempt to keep her job, while would-be independent Rebecca (Kirsty Besterman) is brought low by her former ’protector’. These three cannot cope with being female in an age before legal rights and plastic surgery.

The tough one is Nell – superb, charismatic Charlotte Beaumont – and she reaps her rewards, "a whole house and a park!" But de Angelis makes us consider the nature of Nell’s victory, the autonomy that is achieved only by ceding it to a man.

At the heart of the play lies Germaine Greer’s famous aperçu that all women are female impersonators. It is, undeniably, a feminist piece, although de Angelis is far too intelligent a writer to be merely ideological. And, above all, her play is marvellously entertaining: linguistically rich, stylishly directed by Michael Oakley, in sum one of those evenings when theatre is more alive than life.