“Playhouse Creatures” at Orange Tree Theatre
Neil Dowden in south-west London
25 March 2025
Female actors underpaid compared with their male counterparts, struggling to find substantial roles when older, and targeted with sexual objectification and misogynistic abuse: all too common today, but the norm in the 1660s when April De Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures is set. An entertaining look at theatre history which still strikes a chord, it’s her most revived play, first produced in 1993 but since then seen in different expanded versions. This production returns to the original five characters, all of them based on actresses from the Restoration era when theatres reopened after the Puritan interregnum and women were finally first allowed to perform publically on the British stage.
Zoe Brough as Nell Gwyn.
Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.
The play opens – for some unexplained reason – in the afterlife as Doll Common (real name Katherine Corey, but called thus by Samuel Pepys after her part in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist) recalls that the theatre was previously used as a bear pit where her father trained bears to dance. She is joined by ex-colleague Nell Gwyn, briefly a successful actress but more famous for becoming King Charles II’s mistress. Then we see spring to life their fellow “playhouse creatures”, in excerpts from staged plays and scenes backstage, the ups and downs of pioneering performers who tried to make the most of a precarious career.
They are led by the matriarchal Mrs Betterton (born Mary Saunderson, but married to the Restoration theatre’s foremost actor-manager Thomas Betterton, and the first actress to play roles such as Lady Macbeth and Juliet – fitting for a granddaughter of Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s leading actor). Also in the company are the feisty Mrs Rebecca Marshall, who asserts her rights as a professional actress, and minister’s daughter Mrs Elizabeth Farley, who takes the King’s fancy before being supplanted by the ambitious teenaged former orange-seller Nell Gwyn.
De Angelis made her name as a feminist playwright and though Playhouse Creatures contains much rumbustious humour it exposes the severe difficulties and restrictions that actresses – and of course women generally – confronted at that time. The key is shown to be lack of financial independence. Actresses often had to use their sexuality to achieve success – as we see them performing décolleté as Amazonian warrior archers or playing rival male fencers wearing tight trousers in “breeches roles” – as men in the audience took advantage of this new-found opportunity to ogle women on stage (as well as in the dressing room).
Zoe Brough as Nell Gwyn.
Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.
To gain status and security, actresses sometimes needed patrons or “protectors” with whom they had sexual relationships, but we see these were fraught with danger. Mrs Marshall has been tricked into a false marriage with an earl who takes revenge on her by having shit thrown in her hair after she calls him out publically for being labelled a “whore” in the theatre. Not only is Mrs Farley unceremoniously cut off by the King, she is forced off stage when she becomes pregnant and – after not being able to go through with an abortion that her colleagues reluctantly agree to help her with – ends up as a homeless prostitute. In contrast, Nell Gwyn’s star is on the rise – indeed she was able to retire at 21 due to the besotted King’s generosity – as tensions develop between the rivals.
Even the well-established Mrs Betterton – who also as a renowned acting teacher trained the royal princesses (and future queens) Mary and Anne – owes much of her opportunities to her husband, as we see her eventually negotiate with him to become a shareholder in the company. And in a poignant scene she has to depart to make way for younger actresses whom the paying customers want to eye up.
There are plenty of warm, comic moments too – including much fun lampooning the acting styles of that period – in what is ultimately a celebration of sisterhood amidst all the challenges. A witchy Macbeth-like scene where pins are stuck in an effigy doesn’t work, however. De Angelis’s The Divine Mrs S. (premiered at Hampstead Theatre last year) is an exuberant companion piece about the great actress Sarah Siddons who fights for control over her career more than a century later.
Director Michael Oakley has helmed several plays by De Angelis, including Infamous (about Lady Hamilton) at Jermyn Street Theatre in 2023 and another production of Playhouse Creatures at Chichester Festival Theatre in 2012. This show is alternately amusing and touching, with a real sense of lively theatrical ensemble. Fotini Dimou’s minimal wooden set design includes trap doors and grates which are occasionally filled with a fiery red glare by lighting designer Elliot Griggs, while Max Pappenheim’s soundscape features boisterous audience reactions.
Anna Chancellor is funny as the grand-mannered Mrs Betterton, who likens the exact angling of the head to convey emotion to a clock face (“Despair: five past 12”), though we also sense her determined professionalism and concern for the others’ welfare. Zoe Brough’s earthy Nell Gwyn is full of naive wonder as well as the cheeky opportunism of confident youth. Nicole Sawyerr’s Mrs Farley abandons her puritanical background for the “immoral” theatre but her arrogance after temporarily gaining the King’s favour is later reduced to desperation. Katherine Kingsley entertains as the foul-mouthed Mrs Marshall giving as good as she gets. And downbeat dresser/supporting actress Doll Common is well performed by Doña Croll – a real-life pioneer as the first black actor to play Cleopatra on the British stage in Talawa Theatre Company’s production of Antony and Cleopatra in 1991.
