Stap me vitals! We're having a ball
Published 11 December 2006
Rollicking show brings a flamboyant 18th-century heroine back to life
The Bitches Ball
Hoxton Hall, London N1
The main problem with The Bitches Ball, on in London to 10 December and across the country from the New Year, is that the title is all wrong. It would have been much better to call it The Harlot's Progress, or even Stap Me Vitals, because the show, devised by the physical theatre company Penny Dreadful and directed by Mick Barnfather, is a rollicking portrait of 18th-century society, performed in the heroic style of a Hogarth painting or a Gillray caricature.
Ostensibly, it is the biography of the actress and poet Mary Robinson (1757-1800). Who was she? There's a lovely Reynolds portrait of her wearing a fabulously revealing gown in the Wallace Collection, but her celebrity is now completely forgotten. Yet, in her day, she was not only famous for her Shakespeare at Drury Lane, but infamous for bedding the future George IV. However, her life was no ball, and she's no bitch.
She is a bit of a goer, however, played here with energy and humour by Mira Dovreni. The show begins with Mary, crippled and old, loudly and lengthily pissing into a pot. After this, and aided by a nip of opium, she takes us back through her memories to her precocious, enthusiastic childhood in Bristol. Encouraged by a grotesque teacher, half Jean Brodie, half Wackford Squeers, she eventually has the courage to dump a hideous husband and walk up the "silver road" (presumably today's M4), arriving in London. Here her talent is recognised by David Garrick, the great theatre manager, who puts her on at Drury Lane. She drops the country accent, learns how to curtsy, and hits the big time, at which point both her future and the production move into fifth gear.
Everyone on stage has enormous fun with wigs, dancing shoes, knickerbockers and the general foppery of the Georgian years, which indeed includes someone coming on stage exclaiming: "Stap me vitals!" Tarot readers, nascent paparazzi, carriage drivers and society ladies in the boxes at Drury Lane are all depicted with ingenuity and energy by the company, which manages to make a rather limited set go an awfully long way.
Our heroine is taken up by the Prince of Wales, depicted by Ian Street as an infantile, illiterate brat, and then cruelly dropped when she becomes too famous. Obvious analogies abound, but the company wisely doesn't go down the Diana route, although the night is peppered with modern imagery that includes a boxful of Georgian ladies tearing up (and eating) tabloid newspapers, and the alarming notion of the future George IV "giving head".
After this unwise lurch into profanity, the night gathers its wigs and ribbons and frolics towards the ending, which involves a horse-drawn carriage, a cappella singing, a monstrous image of a giant Prince of Wales and a nightmare sequence where Mary is defeated - but not destroyed.
The company of five belts fluently through an array of costumes and characters, but its greatest skill (apart from that of wearing giant white wigs with conviction) is delivering the two-dimensional caricatures who pepper our popular view of Georgian society, without descending into inane cliché. In particular, Paschale Straiton's eye-rolling guffaws inhabit the spirit of the Georgian fop. Dovreni gives sparkle to the shadowy figure of Robinson, a woman who loved the limelight and revelled in her own intelligence. She ends up a sad figure, disabled (she was partially paralysed, possibly from an infection following a miscarriage) and socially ostracised, but with enough self-belief to relaunch herself as a bestselling novelist and poet.
The company, which takes joint credit for devising this show, would like us to believe she was ruined by the upper echelons of society, which punished her for behaving above her station - and maybe she was. We will never know the truth; but this engaging evening flamboyantly exhumes Mary Robinson, if only for the duration of the play's run.
Booking details and tour dates from www.pennydreadfultheatre.com
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