For those of you that read my review of the third year Writing, Directing and Performance students’ staging of Bryony Lavery’s play Nothing Compares to You, you’ll know that they did so as part of their final practical assessment. This next group of students, also in their final year production, has chosen to do April De Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures, first performed in 1993 with an all-female cast, with De Angelis rewriting it some time later to include two men in the play. Like their colleagues staging Lavery’s play, this group does an impressive job of bringing De Angelis’s play to life.

Playhouse Creatures follows the story of some of the first female actresses that began to work on the English stage in the late 1600s. We follow their public, professional and private affairs, seeing how they interact with each other and the often oppressive audiences they perform in front of. We see the trouble they individually go through, and come face to face with prominent actresses like Nell Gwyn and Lizzie Barry, who demonstrate to the audience that what happens behind closed doors is often more important than what happens on the outside.

Personally, after having studied the play briefly in my first term here at York, I find the text a little tricky to work with. This is mainly due to not being able to latch onto a concrete narrative that guides me through the play; instead, the collection of scenes contains a selection of different narratives. However, the cohort behind this staging of the piece have had no problems in the way they’ve tackled this issue: they bring De Angelis’s play to life with finesse and flair. They present to us an array of well-developed characters, and we can clearly see the relationships between them, which bubble with organic chemistry. At times the energy drops in certain scenes, and this makes it difficult to focus on the characters individually, although this doesn’t happen too frequently.

Like in Nothing Compares to You, what stands out for me the most in this production is the way it’s been designed. The scenography of the piece is simply superb, with razor-sharp rock riffs and dynamic changes in light coming together to mark scene transitions and changes in emotion and mood. It has a simplistic set, with a battered old wooden wall at the back of the stage representing the former glory of the playhouse that the actresses made their marks in. This helps you to focus on the characters and piece together De Angelis’s fragmented narrative.

There are some brilliant images in this production that help to emphasise De Angelis’s intentions, and the cohort really make the production modern and fresh. It’s well-designed and the acting is brilliant, and it’s well worth seeing.

Playhouse Creatures is playing at the University of York until 29 November. For more information and tickets, visit the University of York website.

Image by Emily Jane Sillett