Edinburgh 2022: Eve Pearson-Wright Guest Blog

Guest Blog: Long Lane Theatre Company premiere a heartfelt, interesting new play at the Fringe

Eve Pearson-Wright discusses how she came to write a piece about Margaret Hughes and Anne Marshall; the first women of the stage.

Performer and writer for Long Lane Theatre Company; Eve Pearson-Wright blogs for Broadway World about bringing The Actress to the Fringe, the parallels between women's stories now and in the past and how she honours real women's lives in her theatrical work.

My husband and I wrote a play together called The Giant Killers and we performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017. It was a true story, and we were lucky enough that it was really well received. I adore history and always have. I can't sleep without a historical documentary playing in my ears so when it came to finding our next story to tell I knew I wanted it to be another true story.

Unsurprisingly for an actress my passion is theatre and so I started scratching my head as to what story I could find from that world that was historically significant. We all know that women weren't on the stage in Shakespeare's time and so it was such an obvious question to ask - who was the first woman? What happened to them? Why do we not know?

A quick jump on Google and I was piecing together the story of Margaret Hughes - commonly thought to be Britain's first professional actress. She'd had huge fame and success as an actor in the early period of The Restoration. She'd been a glamorous figure who had a long relationship with The Kings cousin, she was effectively an earlier version of Nell Gwynn.

But then something interesting happened, I started reading a number of accounts from historians that disputed Margaret's claim of being the first woman on the stage. The more I picked the more it seemed likely that the first woman was actually a lady called Anne Marshall, someone that very little is known of. And that fascinated me. How is this woman who did something extraordinary not known about? Who was she and why did she vanish?

The next few months were spent delving into anything I could find on these women or this time.

And then Covid hit. It felt so strange piecing together a play that was set just after the theatres had been closed for twenty years, just as they were shutting their doors in real life and then researching women that had lived through the plague while we were sat watching this new disease unleash itself.

While these woman's stories were fascinating and full of drama it took a long time to decide what we were really wanting to say with the story. But there was something in those months of sitting, waiting for a chance to tell a story, not sure if it would ever come. I realised how similar we are to these women, how their lives weren't that different to ours.

And that's what are play became, yes, it's about these women and the incredible things they achieved and the horrible challenges they faced but it's also about holding a mirror to what the theatre world is like to those on the outside. Those that have something to say but little or no opportunity to say it.

The Actress, Underbelly Bristo Square (The Dairy Room), 4.40pm, 3-29 August (not 16)

Photo credit: Venus Raven

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