Girls on stage

Professional actresses made their first entrance on the London stage shortly after the restoration of Charles II in 1660. This moment of radical female emancipation (boyish male actors had previously been employed to play women's roles) is the subject of April de Angelis's moody 1990s comedy.

Set in a ghostly theatre that formerly served as a bear pit, Playhouse Creatures conjures up the backstage world of that first generation of female players - among them 'pretty, witty' former orange-seller Nell Gwynn and the stately Mrs Betterton, wife of the great Shakespearean actor Thomas Betterton.

The actresses laugh and squabble, pursue love affairs with aristocrats and Charles II himself, and support one another as they are forced to face up to the realities of ageing, pregnancy and social and economic inequality.

As de Angelis makes clear, their fates were not always much better than those of the bears that had previously been made to perform on the site.

It's an engaging, amusing play, although de Angelis's commitment to showing the darker side means that it's far from a romp: the attempted onstage abortion will have you crossing your legs in sympathetic agony.

Alexander Holt's handsome production, staged just up the road from Lauderdale House (one-time residence of Nell Gwynn), gathers together a uniformly excellent cast and recreates, with equal conviction, the pleasures and the pains of the female theatrical life.

Playhouse Creatures
Upstairs At The Gatehouse
Hampstead Lane, Highgate Village, N6 4BD