Brothel dweller, herring gutter, hawker of oranges, mistress to a king and one of the first actresses to walk the English stage. The life of Nell Gwynn was as vivid as anything fiction could invent and is given a bawdy, playfully anachronistic treatment in this highly entertaining new play by writer/director Jessica Swale.
It was with the King’s Company in Drury Lane, one of two troupes supported by King Charles II, an avid theatregoer as well as a dizzyingly priapic seducer, that Nell got her big break, plucked from the stalls with her basket of oranges. The Globe may hark from an earlier era, but it’s a fine setting and director Christopher Luscombe makes full use of its unique ability to involve an audience. The actors heckle from the pit, stride up and down to the stage and involve us, through deliciously metatheatrical farce, in the King’s Company’s backstage shenanigans.
This works particularly well because Swale is as interested in the power of theatre – its ability to draw audiences, even royal ones, together in one charged, transient moment, and the significance of Gwynn’s pioneering role as an actress – as she is in Gwynn’s biography.
But Gwynn remains the focus, especially as played, with luminous charisma, by Gugu Mbatha-Raw. And the rest of the company are excellent, wringing every drop of humour from a script that, if it occasionally veers a fraction too close to pantomime, evokes Gwynn’s irreverent, irrepressible spirit and reminds us of her importance in bringing real female characters, “with skin and heart and some sense in her head”, to the stage.
• Nell Gwynn is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1 until 17 Oct
