Nell, famously, sold oranges (and other things) at the theatre, before she was talent-spotted. She became the best known of the first actresses to grace the stage in the 1660s when theatres re-opened and Restoration Comedy was born – with real women in the cast for the first time. Then Charles II fell for her charms and it becomes a real-life rags-to-riches story.

Georgie Bickerdike is outstanding as Nell. She smiles with translucent charm, flirts, pouts, sings beautifully and is very good at dropping double-entendres, almost literally tongue in cheek. Chris Turner makes a fine fist of the actor manager, Killigrew, with exaggerated actorly diction and Nat Spalding finds plenty of very funny petulance in Nat Spalding whose chance to play female parts is rapidly disappearing. Carl Perkins is reasonably convincing as Charles II  given to pragmatically sitting on the fence because he doesn’t, given what happened to his father, want to antagonise anyone. It’s not his fault that I can never take anyone dressed at Charles II seriously because it immediately takes me and my imagination to Neverland and Captain Hook.

It’s a big company.  Some of the roles which would originally have been doubled – are all cast singly, presumably to maximise opportunity. Thus, along with other reasonably decent acting there’s an enjoyable cameo form Naomi Ing as a furious Queen Catherine and another from Steph Hamer as Nell Gwynn’s bawdy mother. Most of the acting is acceptable but, despite skilful direction, standards are inevitably variable.

The best thing about Swale’s clever play and this production of it, is the send-up of theatre done badly – as comedy it works every time. It’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Noises Off, The Play that Goes Wrong, Our Country’s Good and many more. In Nell Gwynn, though it’s a bit more than that with some serious, quite topical, open-ended questions about who or what theatre is for and who should be doing it – with, of course, some knowing looks at the real 2023 audience lapping it up in Huntingdon’s Commemoration Hall.

The play comprises twenty five short scenes and I think the decision to mark each change with a black out is ill judged. It triggers audience applause and that makes the play feel clumsily choppy. Props and set are pretty simple. It would be perfectly possible for cast members to move from one scene to the next, maybe bringing items on and off as they go which would have made a much more seamless, less hiccough-y show.

High quality acting by a cast of eight, careful directing by Ken McClymont and a lot of humour does not save this bitty, puzzling, often incoherent play from mediocrity.

We’re in familiar nursing home/care home/retirement village territory. Think Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club or Alan Bennett’s Allelujah!. Ashley Davenport (Fraser Anthony – intelligently nuanced acting) is a young man from the upper middle classes who has inherited a fortune. Fresh from travels to India he has placed himself on a “spiritual path” and decides he wants to spend the rest of his life in a care home.

The scenes come thick and fast. First we get four residents in conversation – they are sharply drawn, talk in one liners irrespective of each other and it’s often very funny. “My first wife hid my bagpipes …” The comic timing is strong  especially from Craig Crosbie as Johnny Copthorne, the retired second hand car salesman and master of dodgy deals. Stephen Omer, as a life long depressive pessimist and retired librarian, provides an enjoyable dead pan foil. The Alan Bennett influence is very clear and these are the best bits of the play.

Then, for no apparent reason we cut to the young pair in the kitchen, both illegal immigrants and suddenly we’re in a completely different sort of play – sad back stories and desperation for British citizenship. Interesting but it just doesn’t flow or follow

And on it goes on – over-long for its subject matter and full of anomalies. Why does Miguel (Baptiste Semin – good) the cook from Brazil, conduct a full communion service with hymns? And why, when he’s full of ambition for a future in a famous hotel does he suddenly take his own life? Why is the play so relentlessly condemnatory of marriage?

Surreality and symbolism are all very well but I found the idea of going  euphemistically to the lilac room to die, failing to achieve it but coming back with helpful info from heaven an incomprehensible step too far. It doesn’t mesh with the rest of the play.

Then there are the elephants. Not the figure-of-speech sort.  These are the eating, shitting, noisy ones. Ashley is supposed, according to his great-grandfather’s will, to keep one (Indian of course) in the library of the house he’s inherited but these days it’s allowed to live in the park. Just to reinforce this McClymont gives us a lot of projection on back screens of elephant eyes, hide, feet and finally the full frontal view with trumpeting. It sits very oddly with the quasi reality of the scenes in the care home although I suppose the elephant in the room, idiomatically speaking, is impending death. Maybe the play is meant to be about mental breakdown. If so, it’s a rather unsatisfactory vehicle.

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  Photos: Davor Tovarlaza

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In 1912 to 1914, three women were drowned in their baths, in different parts of the country by the man they thought they’d married, George Joseph Smith, who was caught and hanged, had also conned several other women out of their life savings. The “Brides in the Baths” case was instrumental in driving forward the development of forensic science.

The Drowning Girls, imagines that the three dead women are a united trio cavorting, chatting and communing round a bath tub and, ingeniously mirrored on the back drop so that we can see them even when they’re facing away. Like sisters, they remember, tell their individual stories, act out scenes, compare their experiences and sing, hauntingly, the hymn “Nearer my god, to thee” a poignant version of which dominates the underpinning sound design. It’s a literally wet play, though. There’s water in the bath and a lot of climbing in and out. The cast must feel pretty cold and damp after 70 minutes.

It’s powerful, thoughtful material because it goes beyond the horror of what happened to these particular victims and reflects on a world in which unmarried women had little status and few options. A marriage offer – however dubious the proposer –  promised a much brighter future and there was a lot of insular, female naivety. Sadly, of course, there are still cultures in which this is the norm so this play has topical undertones and that point is subtly reinforced by the ethnic diversity of the cast.

And what a talented cast! Yiling Yang brings mournful stillness, Anamika Srivstava innocent liveliness and Qi Chen chilling resignation. There’s a lot of multi-roling as the story unfolds, done without fuss and subtly observed vocal nuance. These actors are, marginally less convincing when they’re playing men and there are one or two moments when you think “Eh? Who are we now?” but this is a very minor point.

Ranga Jayaratne is clearly an excellent director. I’d like to see more of her work very soon and I hope very much that this play, which has only a 5-day run at The Bridge House is revived more widely as soon as possible because it’s well worth seeing.