PLAYHOUSE CREATURES To 4 November.

Keswick

PLAYHOUSE CREATURES
by April de Angelis

Theatre By The Lake Studio In rep to 4 November 2005
mon-Sat 8.15pm Mat 7 Sept 2.15pm
Post-show discussion 22 August
Run s 2hr 15min One interval

TICKETS: 07687 74411
Review: Timothy Ramsden 10 August

Blazing revival of a play that grows with time.This revival of April de Angelis's 1993 play about England's first women actresses shows how exceptional Keswick's female contingent is this season. To a woman this quintet is magnificent.

After his outstanding 2004 studio Ghosts, director Stefan Escreet's fine production catches the toughness and lyricism of de Angelis' supple script without a false, or strained, note.

Designer Steph Warden evokes an early indoor playhouse in Keswick studio's corner acting area, a stepped platform suggesting the Restoration stage. Escreet uses it to indicate performance and life mixing. Some of the most painful events in these women's lives occur on the 'stage'. For de Angelis writes from the 'glass ceiling' era, reflected back to a theatre where young women attracted audiences for male-scripted fantasies, nobles (and royalty) procured actresses as mistresses, yet women had to fight for a share in profits, and a say in repertoire.

They are no angels; respectable women wouldn't act professionally. Their foul-mouthed, street-wise aggression's caught in the play but also the escape someone like Elizabeth Marsh's Mrs Marshall finds in poetry and imagination contrasting Anna Stranack's Nell Gwyn, hoisting her skirts to dance lewdly out of a crisis.

Though Vivienne Rowdon's Farley is vocally restricted for stage-tragedy she's piercingly moving in her trajectory from triumph as a pursued beauty to destitution, begging and bowed like a bloodied toad against a tableau of her ex-companions.

Marsh follows a similar path, from anger at her ex-Earl lover persecuting her to resignation that she'll never knock real power off its perch. Pamela Buchner's old dresser Doll, the useful survivor, matches caustic humour with the character's non-realistic choric knowledge.

Age is another enemy, Janet Jefferies movingly registering Mrs Betterton's attempts to conceal her pain beneath smiles as she descends like her beloved Lady Macbeth from authority to madness when her lead-actor husband relegates her aging body to diminutive roles.

Stranack shows Nell's upfront resilience and wisdom in a magnificent central performance. She makes a fine comic moment from Nell's debut, eyes and face losing focus in an attack of stage-fright. No such problems for Stranack, in her own rich, full-fledged debut.

Doll Common: Pamela Buchner
Mrs Betterton: Janet Jefferies
Mrs Marshall: Elizabeth Marsh
Mrs Farley: Vivienne Rowdon
Nell Gwyn: Anna Stranack

Director: Stefan Escreet
Designer: Steph Warden
Lightinbg: Jo Dawson
Sound: Andy Bolton
Musical Director: Richard Atkinson
Movement: Lorelei Lynn
Fight director: Kate Waters

2005-08-12 17:05:25