★★★★

“A delightful mix of the traditional and the contemporary.”

In her time, Sarah Siddons was known as the Queen of Drury Lane, renowned for her roles in Shakespeare tragedies – especially her Lady Macbeth. She hung out with the top dramatists of the time, including David Garrick and Samuel Johnson. She had the leading artists fawning over her, desperate for her to be the subject of their paintings. Yet this powerful woman also personified the powerlessness of women at the time. It is the tail end of the eighteenth century. Women were deprived of money, couldn’t own property, and had no real legal rights. No control over their children – nor even their own bodies.

April De Angelis’ play “The Divine Mrs S” takes us backstage, shedding light on the personal tragedy behind the grand ‘tragedies’ portrayed under the spotlights. Sarah Siddons’ acting career was under the direct control of her imposing brother (actor and manager John Kemble), and it was her husband who received her fees and signed her contracts. She was shunted off on a provincial tour when it looked like her acting would upstage her male counterparts. All the while her children appeared to be dropping like flies all around her. But De Angelis, whilst highlighting the dreadful state of affairs, steers well clear of worthy polemic or earnest tragedy, and instead dresses Siddons’ fight for self-expression and self-determination in a couple of hours of very fine comedy.

The language has a contemporary feel while harking back to Restoration Comedy, French Farce, and even touches of Commedia Dell’arte thrown in. De Angelis pokes fun at all the right characters, but doesn’t let righteousness intrude. In occasionally breaking the fourth wall, a charming self-deprecation is allowed to colour Siddons’ earnestness as she conspires with the audience, commenting on everyone’s foibles – including her own.

This mix of feistiness and fun is in no better hands than Rachael Stirling. The sharpness of Stirling’s delivery of Siddons’ words matches the biting wit De Angelis has given those words. Set mainly in the confines of the dressing room it encapsulates the whole world of the theatre. Dominic Rowan neatly conveys the lecherous misogyny of theatre manager Kemble, hamming it up to ridiculous heights when called upon to actually ‘act’ on the stage next to his far more talented sister. Anushka Chakravarti shines as Siddons’ all-knowing maid, dresser, personal assistant and ultimately counsellor. Meanwhile Eva Feiler, Sadie Shimmin and Gareth Snook multirole in excess to bring all the other characters onstage, in the right order and in the right costume. Most notable of these is Feiler’s Joanna Baillie; the writer who has to conceal the fact that she is a woman otherwise her plays will not get staged. When Kemble discovers her true gender he pulls her play, even though it is the most successful production he’s had for a while.

Even that contentious issue is dealt with in good humour. They say that if you want people to listen to you, the best way is to make them laugh. And there are even more laughs in the second act. And also more pertinence. The concept gets trickier, but the message gets clearer as Stirling more frequently steps out of character, allowing her to cast a contemporary perspective on the eighteenth-century restrictions imposed on the woman she is playing.

“The Divine Mrs S” can’t really be labelled a comedy or a tragedy. But it encapsulates both, and addresses serious issues – serving them up as light entertainment. Historically that would classify it as a ‘Problem Play’. But I have no problem with this one at all. A delightful mix of the traditional and the contemporary.

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL at The Coach and Horses, Soho

★★★★★

“Bathurst’s performance is a tour de force, capturing the pure essence of the wayward, accidental hero”

Jeffrey Bernard was a prolific writer. He was a prolific talker, drinker, gambler and womaniser too. But despite arriving each morning at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho, grey-faced and trembling, waiting for the doors to open, he managed to keep up (mostly) his contributions to the Spectator; his weekly “Low Life” columns eventually reaching four figures. Publishers naturally hovered with lucrative offers for his autobiography. When Faber dangled the juiciest carrot, Bernard placed an advert in The Spectator asking if any of its readers ‘could tell me what I was doing between 1960 to 1974?’. He never took the plunge, however, although he did write a spoof obituary of himself which epitomised the acute, self-deprecatory wit found in his columns.

Using the text from the Spectator “Low Life” columns, Keith Waterhouse’s play “Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell” opened in 1989 triumphantly starring Bernard’s friend and drinking companion Peter O’Toole. The Coach and Horses could well have been the rehearsal room. It is fitting, and also a masterstroke of theatricality, to stage a revival in the very pub where Bernard would prop up the bar by day, and by night.

Like the writing, the Coach and Horses on Greek Street conveys a bygone era. Photos on the walls commemorate the late and the great Bernard, cigarettes pile up in ashtrays and Double Diamond is advertised above the bar. Into the crowded room, Robert Bathurst’s Jeffrey Bernard comes crashing through the bar at five in the morning, having fallen asleep in the gents at closing time the previous night. Half-heartedly trying to get hold of the landlord to come and unlock the doors for him, he spends the next hour alternating between the vodka optic and regaling us with hilarious anecdotes. As he paces the bar, the prose trips off his tongue in flourishes of searing wit. Bathurst’s performance is a tour de force, capturing the pure essence of the wayward, accidental hero.

“Bathurst delivers the stories with brilliant insight”

The play’s title is lifted from the heading frequently used by the Spectator magazine to explain the absence of any writing; a euphemism of course. The context is rigidly set in a Soho that no longer exists and may lay itself open to accusations of being dated or insensitive to modern morals. We know what our protagonist would make of that and thankfully we would all still salute him. Even stand him a drink – if he wasn’t continually helping himself already.

James Hillier’s staging significantly cuts back the original text, but seemingly doesn’t cheat on the sharp-witted punchlines that accentuate each anecdote. Bernard had no qualms about making himself the target of his verbal attacks. He knew what he was, so there is no room for judgement nor shame, and absolutely no space for self-pity. Bathurst is well aware of the setting, and this honesty comes through unfiltered – the master raconteur that he is. He easily draws us into the world peopled by drunks, layabouts, criminals but also the likes of Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud. Never sentimental, it is a love-letter – even a eulogy – to a bohemian Soho. A Soho that was dying at the same rate as Bernard himself in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Aged fourteen, he made his first visit to Soho in 1946, and from that point he “never looked forward”. The life he led had perhaps fewer highs than lows, but it was, in his own words, “full of adventure and excess, and I wouldn’t change a single thing.” Bathurst delivers the stories with brilliant insight. We see the cragginess of a loveable rogue and laugh out loud. But we also glimpse the fallout. A short scene in Bernard’s hospital bed is surreally moving, as it resounds with metaphors, as though we are at the “bedside of a dying Soho, holding its hand wondering whether it is kinder to switch off the life support”.

The Coach and Horses has survived a corporate takeover in recent years and still retains its character. It is the perfect setting for this revival of the play, and with Bathurst as the host everyone is going to want to be a regular at the bar. So, get your round in quick.

THE DIVINE MRS S at the Hampstead Theatre

★★★★

“A delightful mix of the traditional and the contemporary.”

THE DIVINE MRS S at the Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed on 28th March 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Johan Persson

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE DIVINE MRS S

THE DIVINE MRS S

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL at The Coach and Horses, Soho

★★★★★

“Bathurst’s performance is a tour de force, capturing the pure essence of the wayward, accidental hero”

“Bathurst delivers the stories with brilliant insight”

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL at the Coach and Horses, Soho

Reviewed on 5th February 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Tom Howard

Top rated shows in January 2024:

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL