The Divine Mrs S: piercing one-liners and a perfect star turn in this hilarious look at women’s lot in life
Who knew 18th-century trolling was a thing? Yet Sarah Siddons, the most celebrated actress of her era, was often the recipient of anonymous letters accusing her of being financially grasping – and, imagines April de Angelis in this excellent semi-speculative new comedy, of neglecting her children. Never mind that Siddons, as the sole family breadwinner, was often forced to leave them at home while she went on tour.
Set backstage at the Drury Lane in 1800, and beautifully skewering the entrenched hypocrisies surrounding female roles both on stage and in real life, The Divine Mrs S is an absolute hoot. A pitch-perfect Rachael Stirling brings an air of fruity exasperation to Siddons, whom we first see effortlessly outclassing her fabulously hammy actor manager brother Kemble in an appalling popular melodrama.
Played with blustery arrogance by Dominic Rowan, he’s a pompous, puffed-up bully who insists on controlling her image, casting her either as passive milk sops or nobly suffering mother figures despite, as she repeatedly points out, her being a thoroughly grown-up 42. (The public also adored her Lady Macbeth, particularly for the “mad” scene.) But after an anonymous new play, in which Siddons plays a rational maturer woman who is clearly his character’s intellectual superior, becomes an overnight sensation, he discovers that the play’s author is a woman and forces the production to close. Siddons, increasingly infuriated by the limitations of her professional and private life, secretly commissions the playwright to write her another.
De Angelis’s last play, Kerry Jackson, at the National, was a right dud, but she’s back on form here with a piece that effortlessly deploys a heightened comedy to distract, but not detract, from a resonant critique of the way popular culture – not least the theatre itself – enforces repressive ideas about female identity. Where another playwright may have been tempted to shoehorn in a 21st-century feministic activism, she scores her points far more effectively through a knowing, 18th century effervescent wit while also serving up a love letter to the joyous absurdities of theatre culture itself.
Rowan is sheer delight, blithely unaware of his complete lack of talent while simultaneously savage enough to underscore just how dangerous his entitled form of power is, while a crack supporting cast take on multiple roles, including Gareth Snook as an obsequious critic who slathers Siddons in praise so long as she is playing, of course, a certain kind of role. Role play, as Siddons points out, is a metaphor for female existence itself – when in a desperate scene she discovers a fan, Clara, who had been emboldened to leave her husband by that earlier radical play, has been placed in an asylum and banned from seeing her children, she urges her to “keep it all inside. Pretend. Act”.
Anna Mackmin’s fleet-footed production keeps the play’s light and dark tones and anachronistic sensibilities in fluent balance, ensuring a very high number of de Angelis’s elegantly pointed one-liners pierce the skin. “Siddons looks for the truth of a character,” says Stirling in one of several declamatory audience asides. ‘She goes in search of an angry mad woman. That shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Until April 27. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com
