HOMAGE TO THE FIRST CELEBRITY DIVA
Last time theatre’s pre-Victorian glory days – silk breeches, rowdy audiences and Garrickian hamming – have been celebrated on this stage was in 2015: in Mr Foote’s Other Leg by Sam Kelly, with a rumbustious Russell Beale. This time it’s a decade or so later: the century has turned with the ultimate King George, and actresses have been turning into respectable and idolized . So we meet our heroine Sarah Siddons at her peak of feminine superstar, recreated. by April de Angelis and director Anna Mackmin from cautious analysis and a wickedly sharp sense of our personal time having seen an elephantine development of that phenomenon. “How wretched is she” cries Mrs Siddons, as any superstar would possibly, “who depends on the instability of public favour!” Few may inhabit that persona higher than Rachael Stirling: she provides with humour and actuality a diva in a woman-thwarting society, emotional and defiant and romantic and sharply humorous, a performer capable of transfer between Shakespeare and melodramatic schlock with sufficient fact to hold it, and hard sufficient to play grieving moms whereas really being one herself (two toddler deaths, two misplaced daughters). She had us from the very first second earlier than the curtains, delivering that East-Lynne model line at a husband’s toes: “Forget an adulterous wretch who will never forget you” , swooning, and being carried deadweight to a chaise longue by her irritated co- star, supervisor and brother John Kemble.
The play is a peculiar however continuously entertaining combination of pastiche, theatrical in-jokes, feminist irony, mischief, absurdity and heartfelt reflections on the alchemy of dragging up yout actual ache to transmit common emotional truths, audibly, throughout footlights to a paying public. De Angelis makes use of the recorded details of Siddons’ lengthy profession – by the point we meet her she is known, painted by Lawrence, however bothered with a spendthrift husband and no energy, working in a scratchy skilled relationship along with her brother Kemble who as actor-manager of Drury Lane is perennially anxious about takings – “I have to muddy my talent with business!” He can also be unwillingly conscious that she just isn’t solely the larger draw however the higher actor. Dominic Rowan as Kemble provides it – in his “onstage” moments past the good swooping curtain – sufficient excessive quantity and exaggerated hamming to shake the set’s halftimbered roof . His fancy leg-work is a deal with, too: correct pre-Victorian dandyism. It is vital to him to be grasp, however on the similar time he’s jealous of the feminine star who all the time will get to do all of the struggling and win sympathy.
But in Angelis’ flight of fancy – based mostly the truth is on an actual girl playwright Siddons favoured however by no means bought onstage – , alongside comes Joanna Baillie, who has creatied a sensitively struggling hero for him to howl by means of. But she really makes the hero’s sister the true energy, to Siddons’ delight, for “what man has a notion of writing a woman with an aged above five and twenty or as a rational being?”
It will get taken off on the second night time. Later, after doing a she-Hamlet in Ireland with some spirited swordplay, Siddons calls for Joanna write her a feminine equal of Hamlet full with “madness, grief, wit, love and fencing’. Joanna concurs, promising that the heroine “goes mad, but not conveniently and quietly with herbs”. It’s a tackle Ophelia I shall treasure ceaselessly because the male Hamlets rave on. But in the meantime there may be an actual abused younger girl pushed by marital cruelty to Bedlam – effectively, by no means thoughts, it’s a sprawly plot.
But wonderful enjoyable, taking its component of bonnet-drama calmly, with temporary narrative bits of of selfdescription by Siddons, within the third individual as per stage instructions, and some diva cries to maintain us amused – “Tour??? I don’t like dressing-rooms with buckets or anywhere north of Birmingham” had the primary night time whooping.
The ensemble is fabulous, Anushka Chakravarti bustling round as a put-upon maid doing the job to keep away from marriage to a missionary, and three others doubling and trebling superbly as the remainder of the anxious, labouring, maverick world of theatre. Eva Feiler does some splendid gender shape-shifting from scuttling anxious playwright to fugitive madwoman and varied chaps; Sadie Shimmin strikes between girl censor in a terrifying black feather hat and a raunchy wench-comedy flip, and Gareth Snook is amongst different issues the oiliest drama critic of any century.
Larks, sharp concepts and a way of appreciable enjoyable being had by all. For, as one of many silk-breeched forged in Kemble’s firm properly observes, “The best way to survive in this business is to adore everything you’re in”.
Having recently watched the excellent Sheridan Smith’s courageous on-line interviews praising Ivo van Hove’s manufacturing of Opening Night , that rang out as one of many perennial and helpful truths of the commerce.
Box workplace. Hampsteadtheatre.com. To 27 April
Rating 4
