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Sometimes the best theatre in London isn't in a theatre. Despite it being the height of the season, with every West End, subsidized and fringe theatre lit every night — despite a queue of plays and musicals waiting for theatre space, praying for a flop so the theatre will become available — despite a procession of star actors and playwrights jockeying for ink and recognition, the most theatrical event in London is over at the National Portrait Gallery, where an exhibition of paintings of "The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons" is just opening. This is where the London theatre really started, after Oliver Cromwell tried, and nearly succeeded, in making England a republic and, with his Puritanism, destroyed the all-male pre-Revolutionary theatre.
After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the new king, Charles the Second — renowned libertine and lover of women, especially actresses — opened the theatre to women, destroying an entire industry of boys playing women's parts and taking the saucy redhead Nell Gwyn, formerly a Covent Garden orange-seller and now the toast of the comic theatre, as his official mistress. There are some serious scholars who believe he actually married her, although that's unlikely.
Actresses in the 18th century, although generally not considered respectable or wife material by royalty or the aristocracy, had a unique position in London society. The best and most famous had their own households with servants, carriages and elegant accommodations. A good actress with a regular company could afford the most fashionable dresses, wigs and hats and was seen at the best public events. They were independent women with their own incomes at a time when all the assets of a woman, no matter how rich or aristocratic, were automatically transferred to her husband upon marriage.
They were the Lady Macbeths, the Perditas, the Ophelias of their day, and their fame alone attracted audiences to Drury Lane and Covent Garden, just as Judi Dench and Maggie Smith do today. Everyone knew the names and the favorite roles of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, Peg Woffington, Dorothy Jordan, Nell Gwyn and their colleagues, and you had to have seen their latest performances to be able to converse in the coffee houses and London parks.
Grand ladies of the time also wanted to act, but of course they couldn't be seen at a public theatre, so in the private houses and stately homes, aristocratic women often put on plays for family and friends. One of the most fascinating paintings in the current exhibition shows Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire — two ladies at the very top of society — and their friend, the sculptress Anne Seymour Damer, as the Three Witches in a private performance of Macbeth, painted by Daniel Gardner in 1775. Because of the closeness and the friendships that grew between the painters and the actors in a London where show was a business even then, the portraits in this exhibition were, in themselves, an intrinsic part of the theatre theatrical. It's wonderful to see them together at the National Portrait Gallery, (geographically) exactly where they should be — just steps from Covent Garden and Drury Lane.
photo by Tristram Kenton |
At the Duke of York's is Backbeat, by Ian Softley and Stephen Jeffreys, about the early days of the Beatles. Waiting for their big break, they have Pete Best instead of Ringo Starr on drums, and their star isn't the foul-mouthed and vulnerable John Lennon but the cool, brilliant and doomed Stuart Sutcliffe — who must choose between being in a band and being an artist, and chooses the art. Backbeat is part play, part rock concert, part biopic, part memory piece. It tells what happened "before" — when they were new, when they were young, when it was all in front of them, when they were five and only three of them would become the Fab Four. It is an entertainment pretending to be a play, a serious drama masquerading as a light-hearted songfest, and a contemporary take on a history we know all too well. It is also thoroughly compelling.
Twenty-five years after its first shocking production, Edward Bond's Saved (closed Nov. 5) got its first major revival at the Lyric Hammersmith. This is the play in which a baby is stoned to death in its pram by a gang of teenage boys as a metaphor for the boredom and apathy of the British underclass. It was brave to mount Saved then, and it still is. I am very glad I had the opportunity to see it in its new production, and I don't ever want to see it again.
The National Theatre is, as usual, in a class of its own. Three shows this month — two new, one revival. The Veil, by Conor McPherson, to Dec. 11, is a beautiful, funny tragic poem of a play, set in Ireland in 1822 at the time when the issues between Catholic and Protestant, land and faith, were becoming the fault lines that would continue to trouble us until our own time. Even when McPherson's preoccupation with spirituality and death tip over into the uncomfortable or the absurd, the poetry of his language and the delicacy of his characterisation enthrall and enrich.
photo by John Haynes |
photo by Catherine Ashmore |
Tracey Ullman returned home to My City at the Almeida (its run ended Nov. 5). The first new play in ten years by film and television playwright Stephen Poliakoff, it's a loose compendium of diverse stories held together by a former head teacher who walks the London streets by night. The Old Vic is hosting J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World — truly authentic, if the sometimes impenetrable Irish dialects are right — with the irresistible Niamh Cusack as the widow down the street. It plays to Nov. 26.
And the encomiums keep coming for Driving Miss Daisy, hot from Broadway, and running to Dec. 17. Boyd Gaines is very good as the put-upon son of the old lady whose failing eyesight requires that she hire a chauffeur. James Earl Jones is breathtaking as always and Vanessa Redgrave is, well, a force of nature.
(Ruth Leon is a London and New York City arts writer and critic whose work has been seen in Playbill magazine and other publications.)
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