When Nell Gwyn hears that her lover, Charles II, is ill, the effects are startling. “I have a rumpus in my bowels. My pot, woman, bring me my pot!” When she’s finished, her maid Margery clears the pot by flinging the contents at the audience.It’s OK – they’re just pretend contents. It’s just one of many sly, bawdy moments which bring seventeenth-century London to life in Steve Trafford’s delightful two-hander “The Restoration of Nell Gwyn”, now playing at the Park Theatre in north London.Nell, as a woman, is forbidden to enter the bedchamber of the dying king. As she waits for news – will the king repeal her pension? Requisition her house? Grant her a title? – she and Margery ponder the ups and downs of a woman’s lot in Restoration England. The vagaries of theatrical life, the joys of love, fears of religious violence, disease, disenfranchisement... Trafford’s witty script touches lightly, now comically and now pathetically, on themes which crackle with contemporaneity.Elizabeth Mansfield is a terrific Nell, full of swagger and wit, and she displays a sweet singing voice in several numbers by Purcell. Angela Curran does an equally excellent job as her plain-speaking maid, and her timing is masterly: “She loves to tell this story!” she deadpans to the audience when Nell launches on an anecdote.The lack of a central conflict or plot gives the show a slightly rootless, un-anchored feel. But Trafford’s relish for the exuberance of seventeenth-century English is a handsome compensation. The feverish King mumbles “like an ass eating thistles”. Life at debauched Tunbridge Wells is “pickle-me-rickle-me-bumfiddle all day.” Lady Castlemaine is “an old trout, who still loves to be tickled.”“Let not poor Nelly starve,” said Charles on his deathbed. It would be a heart-hearted theatregoer who could gainsay him.“The Restoration of Nell Gywn” is at the Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, London, until February 20
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