Pretty Witty Nell
Written and directed by Ryan JW Smith
Rogue Theatre
Barons Court Theatre
Star rating: 3.5
Modern plays written in iambic pentameter are always refreshing and Mike Bartlett does not have a monopoly. This autobiographical, one woman take on Nell Gwynne includes a lot of end rhyme too, usually on alternate lines. And it certainly flows.
Clarissa Adele is on stage, in role, bantering and flirting with the audience as they arrive. Gwynne was, after all, one of the first generation of women to perform on British stages once the monarchy had been restored in 1660 and Puritan privations swept away. So her holding court in a theatre is an effective conceit.
We then get a 55 minute monologue telling the story of her birth in a brothel, career as an orange-selling prostitute before becoming an actress and catching the eye of the “Merry Monarch” who elevated her and the two children she bore him to wealth and respectability of sorts.
Adele is an accomplished performer and very good at saucy double-entendres and a range of voices – as she imitiates Charles II, Cromwell, Queen Katharine and others. Sometimes however her gestures become a bit samey and in places the text is a rather gabbled. The piece could afford to slow down a little. Five minutes on the length wouldn’t hurt.
This play would be a good history lesson for anyone new to the cataclysmic events of the seventeenth century although you have to make allowances for dramatic licence. For example. there were 59 signatures on Charles I’s death warrant of which Cromwell was just one. He was not solely responsible for the regicide as this play suggests. Nonetheless Gwynne’s account of the exhumation and desecration of his body is nicely depicted through Adele doing simple but ingenious things with a wig she holds in front of her. It’s powerful story telling.
