REVIEW: PRETTY WITTY NELL by Ryan J W Smith at Barons Court Theatre 22 – 26 July 2025
'commanding script and bewitching performance' ★★★★★
With a commanding script and bewitching performance, Rogue Shakespeare’s Pretty Witty Nell transports audiences back to the merry, muddied world of the Restoration. A one-woman tragicomic history of Nell Gwynne - the orange seller turned actress turned mistress of the ‘king who brought back partying’ - this is storytelling at its most alive and authentic. Arguably ambitious enough in scope alone, it’s also written entirely in rhyming iambic pentameter. This structure, which at times might isolate a modern audience, instead adds a lyrical pulse to the show that mirrors the theatricality of Restoration comedy. Pretty Witty Nell achieves all the fundamental things a one-woman show should: it is intimate, theatrical, and heartbreakingly vulnerable.
The story of Nell Gwynne is ultimately a tragic one, despite Clarissa Adele doing a wonderful job of concealing this with humour. The show opens in bawdiness, and my expectations are met: a loud, brash, funny actress in a corset, trying to sell me oranges and cracking jokes about inflation, leaves me somewhat bemused before the play even properly begins. The first half continues in this vein – full of girlish banter, Fleabag-esque asides, and a Miranda Hart-like goofiness that charms and disarms in equal measure. Yet, as was true for Nell, this performance conceals a darker undercurrent. Both Adele and writer/director Ryan J W Smith are to be commended for the way the play takes a deft emotional U-turn. Nell’s tragedy unfolds line by line, brought to life by a performance of startling vulnerability. Adele is mesmerising. Across fifty uninterrupted minutes of dense, rhyming iambic pentameter, she doesn’t falter, commanding the stage with nothing more than a few wigs as co-stars. Sure, iambic pentameter is often said to be easier to memorise, the da-DUM rhythm supposedly a faithful metronome, but to sustain it, solo, for nearly an hour is truly impressive. Smith’s script is a firecracker, one deserving of being scribbled on and analysed on the tube home. No thought is spared, no comma unimportant, and every word deliberate. It’s a fascinating concept, and Smith seems to modernise Restoration drama without actually modernising it. The language and form may be firmly rooted in the 17th century, but the energy is distinctly contemporary, pulsing with urgency and immediacy.
Nell Gwynne’s life was far from happy, and it’s essential to recognise that beneath her bawdy humour is a vulnerable child exposed to unimaginable horrors. Groomed, exploited, and subjected to the full weight of 17th-century misogyny, her only relief is in performance. In this sense, Pretty Witty Nell is not just a love story between Nell and Charles II, nor a tragedy about one woman’s life, but instead something far more powerful: an ode to the enduring nature of performance itself. This script would sit comfortably next to Dryden, but with one crucial difference: it is a show about a woman, performed by a woman, telling the story of how women first became actors. It is fitting that Nell Gwynne should be eulogised in the same kind of verse she once fought so hard to perform in.
PRETTY WITTY NELL by Ryan J W Smith. Performed by Clarrisa Adele, produced by Rogue Shakespeare
BARONS COURT THEATRE, LONDON – JULY 22-26, 2025
BEDLAM THEATRE, EDINBURGH – AUG 12-17, 2025
