Nell Gwynn- Tobacco Factory Theatres ✭✭✭✭

Restoration theatre begins with reinvention. After years of closure under the Commonwealth, Charles II reopened the theatres and, in doing so, transformed them. Women appeared on the professional stage for the first time. Audiences returned hungry for spectacle, scandal and sex. The theatre became a place where identities could be created as quickly as they could be discarded. Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn understands that world instinctively. Less a conventional biography than a celebration of theatrical self-invention, it follows a woman who moves from orange seller and sex worker to actress, celebrity and royal mistress, embodying the possibilities and contradictions of Restoration England better than almost anyone else. What makes this production particularly interesting is its decision to divide Nell between four performers. Susannah Weidmann, Cosima Gardey, Lucy Jarvis-Chase and Leah Dawson each inherit the role at different points in her life, tracing her journey through a series…