Player Charles Hart (Emmett Lee Stang) teaches Nell Gwynn (Charlotte Wright) how to act.

If you’re not having a good time onstage, you shouldn’t be there. Everybody in this cast of Nell Gwynn deserves to be onstage: they are having a fucking laugh riot. And their pleasure is infectious: the evening is infused with joy.

Playwright Jessica Swale shows us her version of Nell Gwynn, the most famous actress of Restoration theatre and the longtime lover of Charles II. Gwynn’s prominence is astonishing because she began her life not just in poverty but in the bawdy house where her dipsomaniac mother toiled. In Swales’s telling, Gwynn herself was a prostitute at one point.

And, of course, prostitution comes in many forms: as Charles’s favourite, Gwynn was no doubt one of the best-paid mistresses in Christendom. And she was unapologetic. In a well-documented historical incident that we see a variation of in the play, Gwynn was travelling through London in her coach when the crowd outside mistook her for a woman who was a rival for Charles’s interest and they started hurling insults. “Good people, you are mistaken,” Gwynn smiled and said. “I am the Protestant whore.” [Read more…]