It is tricky to transfer a play from the noisily interactive Shakespeare’s Globe to the politer environs of the West End. If Jessica Swale’s comedy survives the journey, it is for two reasons: because Gemma Arterton, taking over the title role from Gugu Mbatha-Raw, has a natural sparkle and because the play itself cannily mixes Carry On double-entendres with an explicitly feminist message.
What is striking is the play’s similarity to the 2014 stage version of Shakespeare In Love. Once again we see a woman, in this case the eponymous orange-seller turned actor, causing merry havoc in a traditionally male world. We also see a dramatist struggling to turn out new plays: in place of Shakespeare we have John Dryden, who I was sorry to see treated as a plagiarising hack. Above all, the piece, like its predecessor, is a love-letter to theatre itself and the cheerful chaos involved in putting on a play.
The chief delight lies in watching Arterton, who gives her funniest performance since the movie Tamara Drewe. She deploys a formidable range of moues, pouts and smiles, and has a habit of coyly sucking in her lower lip. More crucially, she suggests that Nell, as both an instinctive performer and Charles II’s private favourite, combined an ebullient spirit with a shrewd eye for female advancement. At one point she turns on Dryden for writing yet another flimsy-whimsy female lead and cries, on behalf of her sex: “We’re as knotty and tangly as you are.” Even the big-hearted Nell is shown to treat her gin-soaked, pipe-smoking mum with a certain disdain.
The other characters are closer to Carry On types. When Nell, as an actor, says to the king: “Haven’t you seen my Florimel?” and he replies: “I’ve been waiting to see your Florimel for weeks,” it’s easy to imagine the line being delivered with a Sid James cackle – a temptation David Sturzaker as Charles heroically resists. Greg Haiste, as Edward Kynaston, who finds his role as the King’s Company’s female lead being usurped by Nell, hits a note of high outrage worthy of Kenneth Williams. Michele Dotrice as Nell’s earthy dresser also robustly inhabits a part that could have been tailor-made for Hattie Jacques.
Swale’s play skips lightly over the political and religious conflicts of the period and, in particular, over Charles’s secret adherence to the Roman faith at a time of Anglican dominance. Instead, it is happy to celebrate Nell as an icon of female progress and to give the audience a good time. In this, it is much helped by Nigel Hess’s score, which sets bawdy lyrics to seductive melodies and sends the audience out humming Nell’s: “I can dance and I can sing / And I can do the t’other thing.”
Hugh Durrant’s designs are pleasantly colourful and Christopher Luscombe’s production whips the action along. I’ve seen plays, such as April de Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures, which tell one more about the gender politics of Restoration theatre. If this one is remembered it will largely be for Arterton, who offers the most generous, and broadest, of Gwynns.
- At the Apollo, London, until 30 April. Buy tickets at the Guardian box office, or call 0330 333 6906.
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