Writer: April De Angelis
Director: Anna Mackmin
We can only imagine what it must have been like to witness Sarah Siddons, the greatest actress of her time, play Lady Macbeth, but it’s described here, in April De Angelis’s new play, as a thrilling experience. Wearing a nightdress when previous Lady Macbeths had worn full costume, Siddons – as she’s called by everyone – enraptured Regency audiences. But roles for female actors were limited. When this play begins, Siddons’s roles are reduced to ‘milksops’. In the search for a better part, Rachael Stirling is magnetic as the legendary actress, but too much of The Divine Mrs S is played for laughs.
Siddons was a far superior actor than her brother, John Philip Kemble. However, anyone would be better than Dominic Rowan’s Kemble, hamming it up at Drury Lane Theatre every night. He shouts and he gurgles his words to such an extent that his lines are often indecipherable. It’s a funny way to begin the play, but it’s a comic scene that is oft-repeated throughout the two and a half hours.
There’s hardly any difference between Kemble the actor and Kemble the manager of the theatre. He struts and strides in the dressing room too, preciously searching for compliments on his acting prowess, desperate to be as revered as his sister, whose fainting on stage triggers fainting within the audience. Rowan gives Kemble little depth here. He’s just a self-conceited buffoon. When his darker side – he snatches Siddons’s payment for sitting for a portrait and sexually assaults her dresser – is revealed, it fits awkwardly with the rest of Rowan’s performance.
In contrast, Stirling’s Siddons is a more rounded character. She is regal and yet astute, flighty backstage but fully committed when she treads the boards in front of her adoring fans. Even though she is the major box-office draw, she can’t fight the decisions of her brother and her husband who send her off to act in Ireland when the play she is in bombs. Siddons is a working mother who has to deal with vile letters telling her that she should stay at home and look after her children. Stirling manages to portray all these contradictions and challenges with ease.
For such a feminist story, De Angelis is wise not to introduce scenes from our present as a way to demonstrate the sexism in theatre today. Many other playwrights would have been tempted to bring an explicit parallel for audiences to underline the fact that little has changed when it comes to giving older female actors meaty roles. Siddons sums it up as ‘same part, different bonnet’. However, De Angelis trusts that the Hampstead audience will be able to draw its own conclusions without having the issue blatantly described. When the female playwright, Joanna Baillie, whom Siddons commissions to write her a role, talks about smashing the patriarchy, it’s a lovely anachronism that never needs to be repeated.
Baillie’s proclamation brings laughs, but so, too, does much of the play, which occasionally heads towards farce meaning that much of Siddons’ fascinating history is lost. Her success at playing Hamlet is only referenced when she learns how to fence, the power of her pregnant Lady Macbeth is never mentioned while her marriage is thinly alluded to – her husband is always at home with his mistress. Some of the minor characters who continually pop in and out of the dressing room are there for exposition purposes only and a few of the actors who play them struggle to mine the comedy out of these roles. Accents are lost, jokes are overdone and Kemble becomes increasingly and unnecessarily sweary.
Liz Brotherston’s set looks huge and impressive on the Hampstead stage, but perhaps a quieter, smaller examination of Siddons’s life is needed. A two-hander between Stirling and Eva Feiler, a wonderfully nerdy and awkward Baillie, might have been all we needed to know more about the celebrated star of the theatre and her yearning for parts that went beyond portraying women as passive and uncomplicated. Siddons, as Stirling shows so well, was neither of these things.
Runs until 27 April 2024
