The Divine Mrs S

Posted by Verity on April 14, 2024 in feminism, History, Theatre review | 2 comments

Hampstead Theatre, until 27 April

To Hampstead, to see the exquisite Ms Stirling give us her Divine Mrs S, aka Sarah Siddons.

It’s practically a dame’s duty to go and see this play. Written by April de Angelis and directed by Anna Macklin, it sets out to present how much pressure Sarah Siddons was under while she forged her career as an actress whose refreshing naturalism took London by storm.

Then as now, it was not easy being a woman in the public eye. Mr Siddons was not what you’d call a provider, so it fell to Sarah to earn a living in the profession that she’d been born into. The public swooned to see her on stage, while the press hastened to vilify her for abandoning her children to work.

The play is set in Siddons’s dressing room, where she welcomes – or sometimes tries to repel – a series of visitors. She can’t very well exclude her brother, John Kemble, the manager of the company and male lead. This bellowing, gesticulating ham is insanely jealous of his more talented sister, and one of the funniest scenes in the play is when he begs Sarah to let him into the secret of her superior craft. It turns out that it has never occurred to him to tap into his own emotions to fuel his performances.

Throughout much of the first act there is an exuberant, cartoonish quality to the play. Gareth Snook brings a wonderful foppish gaiety to his role of Foaden the critic, whose elaborate transports of delight never fail to amuse. In the second half, the subplots crowd in, and the death of Siddons’s daughter brings a darker mood. Artistic integrity takes a blow when Kemble ditches aspiring playwright Joanna Baillie’s Aura for yet another performance of Macbeth, with Siddons’s showstopping turn as Lady Macbeth (on her last performance of this role the public literally did not allow the play to continue after the sleepwalking scene).

Rachael Stirling as Siddons is faced with the challenge of uniting the frivolity of the comic idiom with the need to give an insight into her grief at the fate of her daughter. There is no doubt that, with her natural elegance and slightly husky voice, she captures the charm and charisma of her public persona, but I’d have liked to see a few more of her tragic performances, which included Desdemona and Ophelia.

Is the play perhaps too schematic? After all, we have at least three other female characters to articulate the many and varied problems women face(d): the wife of the Lord Chancellor who does all his censorship work for him but receives no credit for it; Joanna Baillie, the female playwright (a real person) struggling to be taken seriously, and the young woman incarcerated in a lunatic asylum to prevent her from taking to the stage.

Do we care? After all, it’s also hugely enjoyable, full of sparkling wit, and infused with a genuine love of the theatre.