When I first heard about the play, I was excited that I was going to watch a performance about Restoration theatre and Charles II’s decision to allow women to perform on the stage. This would be a play about feisty women taking over the stage. Instead what we are presented with is a lot of women backstage bickering, the plague preventing them from performing, and a general petering out of anything worthwhile.
The play opens with a couple of women serving the audience oranges, reminding us that Charles II’s mistress, Nell Gwynne, was supposedly an orange-seller turned actress – but this is not about her. Instead a man struts the stage overacting (purposefully undertaken to show his kind of man-acting) reading out the proclamation while five women sit and listen to him.
All the characters mentioned are based on real actors who were the first women to perform on the Restoration stage – Rebecca and Anne Marshall, Margaret Hughes and Katherine Corey (a standout-performance by Amy Loughton) and were all well-known performers of their day. Once the women start performing in public, the usual rhetoric takes over with the catcalls of whores and gossip in the newspapers targeting them as upstarts – they are accused of failing to follow ‘God’s natural order’, where women stay at home being wives and mothers. It was put about by the Puritans that women on stage would incur the wrath of God. By the time the plague hit, it was felt to be conclusive evidence. I was hoping for some sort of feminist statement, a revelation. But wait – one of the actress falls into the trap, herself seeing the plague as ‘the wrath of God’ for allowing women on stage – not what we feminists in the audience want to hear.
We have been here before, the transition from men to women playing female parts was explored in Jeffrey Hatcher’s The Compleat Female Stage Beauty. There too, Edward Kynaston decried the acting ability of actresses. Velvet Glove doesn’t go any further, it really needed to bring something new to the party as comparisons would obviously be made.
Most of these woman are on the fringes of fashionable society, some on the lookout for a gentleman who will change their fortunes, others want recognition for their art. Yet they all recognise that the rowdy audiences are failing to watch them acting. They men are there to letch and leer over their bodies while dressed in breeches to show off their figures.
Patrick Strain plays Thomas Killigrew, the English dramatist and theatre manager, who directs them to read his new play. As an audience we are watching the women acting out a play within a play – a bad play at that – which went on far too long, and did not really add anything to the play we were watching. One of the characters, Lizzie, wants to catch a man for herself from the audience, but later disappears. It turns out she is dead, ‘a stupid mistake’ says one woman, but we never find out what has happened to her. Lizzie is never seen again. Bit of a plot-hole really.
I wanted some sort of comment about the misogyny of it all, but how women could now, at least, make a living from the stage – but no real meaty statement was forthcoming which, on the whole, I found disappointing.
The play was only an hour long and did not need a 15 minute interval.