‘It must have felt extraordinary’: the play inspired by English theatre’s first female actors
Trailblazers … The Actress at Underbelly, Bristo Square. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian The company behind The Actress has dug into 17th-century archives to bring to life two pioneering women of the stage O N 8 December 1660, crowds accumulated on Vere road, off Oxford avenue in London, where the King’s organization changed into acting Othello. The night turned into cold and windy, the sky prepped for a storm. For the first time within the history of professional English theatre, a female changed into taking to the level. “It have to have felt notable,” says Eve Pearson-Wright, from the husband-and-wife organisation lengthy Lane Theatre. Its new manufacturing, The Actress, explores the generation. “these girls – who have lived thru the Puritan era – are unexpectedly witnessing one in every of their personal, up there on level, going toe to toe with the guys.” Taken into consideration immoral and immodest, London’s theatres were closed with the aid of the long Parlia...