The playwright, actress and novelist Fidelis Morgan, whose special subjects include the Restoration female dramatists and violence from the Greeks to Tarantino, has a provocative suggestion for making the theatre more exciting: “Make acting illegal again! Most of what I see on the London stage these days should be banned anyway.
“Can you imagine how exciting that would be? Just as it was when the theatres were closed down in 1737 and all those fayres and illegal performances sprouted all over the place – they could charge for a glass of beer and throw in a free play. The audience could be arrested, too, and fortune-seeking directors would disappear, so we’d get rid off all those talent-free idiots poncing around.”
That would be one way of eliminating complacency and timidity from the theatre, I suppose, but it might harm the tourist industry and eliminate a few ticket agencies. (“Hooray,” yelps the absolute Morgan.)
Her own skilful adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, which headlines the Earls Court Festival at the Finborough Theatre in West London next month (July), might survive in such circumstances: we’d have to creep along to this tale of pre-War loneliness and obsession and sign up as club members with a guilty secret like the alcoholic hero George Harvey Bone. The author could not be more delighted.
The play was first seen at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1990. “It became a cult hit,” says Morgan, unapologetically. “The Pet Shop Boys came to the first preview, Liza Minnelli came along and Mick Jagger and Michael Winner wanted to make a film.” Twentieth Century Fox (who had made the inaccurately Victorian 1945 version starring Linda Darnell and George Sanders) put the price of the rights so far up that interest evaporated.
So the Finborough revival, the first since the premiere, arrives not only in the wake of renewed interest in Hamilton, partly thanks to Sean French’s fine biography, but also at a key time in Morgan’s career: she is an established novelist — with four wonderfully entertaining “Countess and Alpiew” books behind her; the two showbiz gossips and sleuths (one a slightly raddled former royal mistress, the other her snowy-bosomed, charmingly adventurous sidekick) frolic through Restoration London mixing with the likes of Colly Cibber, Isaac Newton and Samuel Pepys, solving crimes and sampling the low life – who suffers from the acting itch after ten years away from the stage.
That acting career took her to Perth Rep as a Kit-Kat girl in Cabaret, then round the world understudying Glenda Jackson in Trevor Nunn’s production of Hedda Gabler before she found her own true feet playing a series of burdened peasants, tarts, dowagers and her favourite Mrs Peachum (in The Threepenny Opera) at the Glasgow Citizens throughout the 1980s. She was less happy as Kath in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane – “a horrible play by a horrible little man who obviously loathed women.”
She was advised to stop acting ten years ago by publishers and agents who felt that her writing wouldn’t be taken seriously if she was treading the boards (“Of course it’s exactly the opposite now; you can’t get published at all unless you appear in a soap opera, or shag a footballer”). So she bowed out with a stern, deep-voiced Mrs Pearce in Pygmalion at the Nottingham Playhouse which, I said at the time, gave everyone a fright. Another critic commented that she made the fearsome Mrs Danvers in Rebecca seem like the last word in warm approachability.
She is the eldest of three daughters (her father is an Liverpudlian dentist, her mother was an Irish musician and painter), born in a gypsy caravan in a field near Stonehenge, and she took a drama degree at Birmingham University, where she fell under the spell of her tutor Jocelyn Powell, the Restoration specialist. “We did a project on The Way of the World in which we not only performed the play, but also researched the costumes, the scenery, the history, everything. I fell in love with the verve of that time.”
This led to her first book, the seminal edition of The Female Wits which has been adopted as the bible of Restoration drama for feminists; she hatched the idea, sitting freezing in the wings, while playing Polina in The Seagull in Glasgow. She followed up with a fascinating biography of Delarivier Manley, one of those “lost” playwrights, and a brilliantly imagined narrative of Charlotte Charke, the actress daughter of Colley Cibber.
One of the Citizens productions that came to London in her time was the 1988 Philip Prowse production of The Vortex in which Rupert Everett played Nicky and Maria Aitken his mother. Morgan was the opera singer past her best, and very funny she was, too. She started writing Hangover Square during the run at the Garrick, outrageously memorialised in Everett’s superb recent autobiography as a backstage nightmare with Aitken turning into a matronly monster and Morgan throwing fire extinguishers at the company manager.
A life-long fan of Colette, she broke her self-imposed exile and popped up briefly in a Prowse production of Cheri in Glasgow in 2003, playing the hero’s mother in a large hat and fox fur, presiding over a card school of squabbling old bats in the Paris suburbs and announcing her change of life as a post-menopausal triumph: “We have ceased to be women! The beast is dead, thank God…”
She realised during the run that she needs to be acting in order to carry on writing. “I’ll do anything, really, a cough and a spit – or a tongue and a shovel, as the Victorians used to say. I love the theatre life; I love the bang, bang, bang of personalities. In publishing, people think in terms of a ladder, the next step all the time; in the theatre, it’s not like that. It’s a carousel. And I want to jump back on. Especially if there’s any slight chance it might become dangerous again.”
