It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when being an actor could get you thrown in prison or flogged – and it was nothing to do with harsh theatre critics who believed in corporal punishment. During the English civil war and Protectorate the Puritans were busy banning dancing, drinking and Christmas. As they had a large New Model Army that could make people do what they wanted, they also closed the theatres. Cromwell was keen to spread his too much fun is bad for you attitude across the nation and hoped that rather than putting on plays the actors would spend their evenings in church.
Human beings being human beings that was not the effect. Like alcohol during prohibition plays merely went underground. You could still find them in the nearest speakeasy – or manor house.
Civil Rogues, written by Tim Norton and directed by Marieke Audsley asks what life might have been like for actors during this period. Luckily for the audience it ignores the languishing in prison side of things and lets us glimpse the imagined life of actors on the run.
A performance of Romeo and Juliet is interrupted by Cromwell’s men who haul the actors off to gaol. Three escape, and manage to make it to the local manor house – with no possessions but what they are wearing. Unfortunately what they are wearing are women’s clothes – having been the ladies in the play. We’re not talking miniskirts or easily changed sarongs, but big, multi-petticoated, hooped farthingales.
17th century mistaken identity ensues, with the difficulties increasing when the bold lady of the house played by Kate Craggs decides to put on a play, thinking the theatre is an ideal way to waste her money and prevent it falling into the Roundheads’ hands. The thespians are keen to get involved and play the heroes, but are slightly stymied by the fact they are claiming to be a mother and two daughters…
Civil Rogues has a superior cast, led by Laurie Davidson, Sam Woolf and Justin Hornsby-Cowan, who plays the funniest scene whilst trying to be two people at once. All characters are well played, with Ed Davis’s Theophilus Bird particularly entertaining as a lowly servant who doesn’t notice several masculine attributes and declares his love to ‘Cordelia’.
Developed at The Other Place at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Civil Rogues has also benefited from a Kickstarter campaign to raise money. Life is never easy for the arts and recent world financial problems can appear to be a similar persecution of the thespian’s art, achieved though funding cuts rather than soldiers. Civil Rogues is an enjoyable historical frolic that brings the interregnum alive and demonstrates the indefatigability of the human spirit. The King might have lost his head, but the show(ing off) still goes on.
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