Review: Nell Gwynn at Shakespeare North Playhouse ****

Teenage orange hawker, feisty and droll star of the stage and finally the much-loved, long-term romantic partner of a king.

Restoration playwrights would no doubt have chewed off their left arms to create a character even half as bold and memorable as Nell Gwynn, the woman who - for a brief time - became their real-life muse.

And some 350 years on, Gwynn proves an equally luminous presence in Jessica Swale’s warm, witty and effervescent celebration of a very human heroine, brought keenly to life in this new production being premiered at Shakespeare North.

Or rather co-production I should say, with the Prescot playhouse one of three theatre-in-the-round partners involved in the endeavour, the show set to travel on to Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake before entertaining Storyhouse audiences in the open-air setting of Chester’s Grosvenor Park later this summer.

It’s the mid-1660s and following a royal beheading and a failed Puritan experiment, the monarchy is back in glorious Technicolor. Meanwhile not only are theatres open and enjoying brisk business, but Charles II (Guy Woolf) has decreed real-life women can tread the boards!

This is bad news for ‘boy players’ like Ned Kynaston (Stanton Wright) whose previously busy career in womanface has imploded as a result, and Wright is delightful as the bitter and brilliantly bitchy thesp and owner of a monstrous theatrical ego, who is consumed with method and motivation and ever looking to embellish and augment his diminished opportunities.

It’s good news though for one Eleanor 'Nell' Gwynn (Rose Shalloo), talent spotted in the pit at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane after her merciless takedown of a heckler during a particularly painful prologue performance and subsequently given lessons in the art of actorly emoting by Charles Hart (Elliot Harper) the King’s Company’s romantic lead.

Above: Nell Gwynn (Rose Shalloo) and Charles Hart (Elliot Harper). Top: Nell takes her first steps on stage. Photos by Pameil Raith Photography.

She may be the daughter of a Covent Garden bawdy house keeper, but Nell’s natural charisma, self-deprecating humour, intelligence and sometimes reckless spirit propel her to stardom and into the even more stellar orbit of the merry monarch himself. Think Pygmalion with big curly blows.

Charles II is said to have had a dozen mistresses, but chances are most people today could only name one – Nell. And while Barbara, Lady Castlemaine (Celia Cruwys-Finnegan) and the French femme fatale Louise de Kerouelle (the busy Cruwys-Finnegan again) appear savvy political operators on constant manoeuvres, she retains the royal affection by simply being herself.

But Nell Gwynn isn’t only a celebration of the remarkable woman Samuel Pepys dubbed ‘pretty, witty Nell’, but also a love letter to the theatre itself and the blood, sweat and tears that go into creating magic on stage.

Kynaston in particular proves an erudite keeper of the flame while, when his influential but exasperated secretary of state Lord Arlington (Adam Clifford) questions the time he spends enjoying entertainments instead of forging foreign alliances and making policy, Charles II insists that “playhouses are a valuable national asset.”

Above: Guy Woolf as KIng Charles II. Photo by Pamela Raith Photography.

One might say the same of the playhouse in Prescot's Prospero Place. It's certainly a great fit for Swale's play which started life at Shakespeare's Globe back in 2015, creating an intimate shared experience between actors and audience in what is at times a metatheatrical endeavour.

Shalloo twinkles brightly as the titular heroine and forthright force of nature who refuses to be confined by class or sex, or to play mimsy female characters (she dismisses Juliet as a ‘noodle’ for killing herself over a boy and suggests Shakespeare “learn to write proper plays”) - but outside the theatre finds herself torn in different directions as her star rises.

Woolf meanwhile both revels in his restored royal’s swaggering libidinous lust for life but also reveals the anxieties and fear of a man who watched his father die and spent a decade in exile, fears that it seems lurk just beneath the insouciant regal veneer.

Above: The ensemble in Nell Gwynn. Photo by Pamela Raith Photography.

There’s also some very enjoyable ensemble work from the band of actor-musos under Bryony Shanahan’s sprightly direction, although at the matinee I attended I would have appreciated even more energy and general rollicking, particularly in the scenes among the theatricals.

As for the real Miss Gwynn? After Charles II died in 1685 (entreating his brother to ‘let not poor Nelly starve’), she only outlived him by a couple of years, succumbing to a stroke at the far too young age of 37. But thanks to the strength of her own lifeforce, and to writers like Swale who still want to celebrate and channel it, she lives on.

As she does, it appears, through real-life descendants via her sole surviving child with Charles II, including a notorious fortune hunting grandson, Lord Sidney Beauclerk MP - scathingly described by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as ‘Nell Gwynn in person, with the sex altered’, which seems a tad mean girl from someone who had an equally colourful life story.

While Nell might well have felt insulted by being branded a fortune hunter, Lord Sidney seems to have rolled with it. As for his hunting, it finally brought him to the door of Mary Norris, the heiress to none other than Liverpool’s Speke Hall.