A tour de force (but then it would be...)
Considering they were contemporaries (well, overlapping) it is a shame there isn’t an all ladies Siddons Club where the members could thumb their noses at the Garrick. At the Hampstead then, for ‘The Divine Mrs S’’s last preview.
It is 1800, David Garrick is 20 years dead, and Sarah Siddons is commanding Drury Lane, particularly with her performance as Lady Macbeth, a role she has reinvented by going back to the text. But her brother, Kemble, the Theatre Manager and her co-star, and her philandering husband effectively rule her, even though it is she who brings in the crowds (and the money).
The intention of the playwright, April De Angelis, is to show us a woman writer of the period creating a play (Montfort) for Siddons in which the female protagonist has full agency and which is grabbed, in both hands, by Siddons. It is both an idea very much not of its time, and shown as such in the play. The fact that the play fails when the author is uncovered as a woman tells us all, and more, than we need to know of the time.
This is a very clever play – Mrs Siddons is played by the almost equally starry Rachael Stirling – who happily breaks the fourth wall as she uses us both as the audience now and back then, accompanied by 5 other actors, three of whom (apart from her brother Kemble (Dominic Rowan) and her dresser Patti (Anushka Chakravarti)) double madly (and very effectively).
It is played out on a single set (backstage and dressing room) – it is a set-up any real theatre manager would die for!
This is funny, moving, curiously historically accurate – the declaiming style of the other actors when acting on the Drury Lane stage couldn’t be bettered by Donald Wolfit – and even when introducing intentional modernisms it is effective. Even if it doesn’t transfer (and it deserves to, I think) it will be happily revived by theatre companies happy to catch its cost-effective magic.