After a foray into modern times with Kerry Jackson for the National Theatre, writer April De Angelis returns to the turn of the 19th century for The Divine Mrs S, a play whose leading character is ‘The Queen of Drury Lane’, Sarah Siddons.
As in her play Infamous, which presented the story of Emma Hamilton, De Angelis looks for the ways in which historical figures like Siddons can be used to study the realities for women in the early 1800s.
Siddons (Rachael Stirling) is a great actress who is bored with the distressed mothers and wives she is assigned by actor-manager brother Philip Kemble (Dominic Rowan, gloriously chewing the scenery ‘on stage’ and showing a jealous vulnerability ‘off’).
Playing these roles has a curious effect on Siddons, who faints at the close of every performance – illness, drink, drama, vanity or despair, we never knows why – and baulks at the interruption of any visitor.
She also steps out of her story now and then to offer her own stage directions but doesn’t always follow them, indicating the invisible cage of expectation and respectability around her. Mrs Siddons may be ‘divine’ but still is still a living being.
Other than Kemble, the other men including company fop, rich rake, impoverished bit player, and caustic critic, are all played by Gareth Snook, who adds to the fun while offering another layer of patriarchal suffocation.
With the addition of maid Patti (Anushka Chakravarti), Scots writer Joanna Baillie (Eva Feiler) – a fascinating and groundbreaking woman in her own right – and officious censor’s wife Mrs Larpent (Sadie Shimmin) there’s much to digest.
Despite Lez Brotherston’s clever inverted stage design, setting most scenes in the recesses of rehearsal or post performance, and Anna Mackmin’s brisk direction, The Divine Mrs S doesn’t quite give the rounded portrait it promises.
The real Siddons had seven children, with the two daughters mentioned here dying as adults. The play infers the rich donor compromised them both, as both Siddons’s brother and separated husband control her work and finances.
Another character reports domestic violence, and is dispatched out of sight by her husband; yet another has to deal with the unwelcome advances of an employer. Siddons herself has to act on- and off-stage with propriety, as emotions are unwelcome from a woman.
Best to leave the over-emoting to Kemble, then, who declaims his lines in the form popularised at the time (as recordings of Henry Irving later in the century confirm). His is the power to consign his sister’s Hamlet to the provinces and curtail her search for better material from Baillie.
For all this potential of plot, Siddons herself feels more of a cypher, reactive rather than proactive. In life, she did leave Kemble’s company for Covent Garden (in 1804) and enjoyed some success without him.
It is true that her performances influenced women to display excessive emotion from her 20s and probably ensured her longevity and professional reputation while causing consternation at the time.
There’s a fascinating play to be unearthed about Siddons, Baillie, Patti, or even Sarah’s sister, Ann Hatton, a successful writer of novels of librettos.
The Divine Mrs S has its moments of comic and pointed reference to bringing down the pre-eminence of men, but it could go further. Stirling is worth the admission, but I just wanted a little bit more.
The Divine Mrs S continues at Hampstead Theatre until 27 Apr with tickets here.
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Image credit: Johan Persson