"April De Angelis goes time travelling again," said Clive Davis in The Times.
Last year, her portrait of Sarah Siddons, a star of the late 18th century London stage, premiered at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Now, a "vivacious" revival of 1993's "Playhouse Creatures" – her drama about the pioneering women who were the first to be allowed to tread the boards when the theatres reopened during the Restoration – has opened at the Orange Tree in Richmond.
This is a fractured, "dream-like" piece, in which we eavesdrop on the women backstage as they discuss their lives and their work, and also see them perform in front of an invisible audience – which, channelled through the production's "nuanced sound design", sometimes responds with "ripe misogynistic abuse". The historical figures are arguably one-dimensional. But the cast, led by Anna Chancellor as Mary Betterton, the "imperious" wife of a theatre owner, "invest their characters with so much passion and humour that you are content to overlook the minimal plotting".
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