Ruth Leon’s Theatre Pocket Reviews

Opening Night – Gielgud Theatre              This one is a hot mess. The much vaunted Dutch director Ivo van Hove has adapted and directed the 1977 John Cassavetes’ film about a leading lady buckling under the strain of opening a new play, pummelling it into a musical with songs by Rufus Wainwright. Poor Sheridan Smith, the tattooed lady, is stuck with a role that even Sarah Siddons couldn’t make sense of (more on her later).

As she disintegrates, and Sheridan Smith fans will remember that she did exactly that during the West End run of Funny Girl, which is creepy to watch in fictional form, van Hove saddles her with screens, scrims, a huge but underused cast, videographers wandering around on the stage making nonsense of the action, scenes which go nowhere and scenes which seem to belong in another play, live video displayed on a huge screen behind the action, even an overactive ghost. Rufus Wainwright’s songs, the best part of the production, get lost in the melee.

After about 10 minutes I lost the desire to work out what was going on. After 20, I lost the will to live.

The Divine Mrs S – Hampstead Theatre              This one is a lot more fun, not to mention a lot easier to follow. Not surprisingly, the writer April de Angelis has a lot to say in The Divine Mrs S about the paucity of opportunity for female playwrights and much of it is very funny, if also heartfelt. 

The Mrs S of the title is the unassailable actress of her day, Sarah Siddons. When we meet her on Hampstead’s stage, in Lez Brotherston’s splendid design for Drury Lane, she is, she tells us, “forty…..……two”. Trying to convince us that she is only still acting to support her feckless (unseen) husband and children, we know instinctively that the theatre is the air she breathes and that the extravagant praise she receives from audiences, critics, and censors, is her meat and drink.

Sarah Siddons, played with gusto and strength by Rachael Stirling, was, by any measure and by all contemporary reports, a truly great actor, able to shine in roles from milksop wives to a cross-dressing Hamlet. She has been the toast of London all her life, born to the Regency’s most prominent theatre family, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, performing for the Royal Family, one of the highest paid working women in the world. Her brother, John Philip Kemble (Dominic Rowan in a clever and funny performance), who owns the Drury Lane Theatre, is her manager and leading man. She knows exactly how to play the celebrity game, charming and bullying by turn, retaining the love of the fickle London audience including critics and censors, throughout her career.

But now she is “forty…..two” and she wants grown-up roles more in keeping with her intelligence and power. She wants to choose her own part and she finds it in a play written by a woman. It opens to great acclaim until it is discovered that the playwright is female. It fails, ticket sales immediately fall off, and the playwright, Joanna Bailey, – Eve Feiler in a career-making performance – never writes another, despite Mrs Siddons’ entrieaties.

April de Angelis, a top contemporary female playwright, has turned this true account of theatre life in the Regency into a funny and truthful play, finding all the humour and pathos in a woman who, though successful, is facing age and irrelevance head on and trying to find her way to an uncertain future.

So different from the messy finale of Opening Night which Van Hove has given a preposterous happy ending and poor Sheridan Smith and the rest of the company a cheerful song and dance denouement which would be more believable in a Jerry Herman musical, say, Hello Dolly!