At the time of her death in 1829, at the grand age of 90, Eleanor Butler had been living with Sarah Ponsonby in Plas Newydd, Llangollen, for half a century. Feted in their lifetime and together known as the Ladies of Llangollen, they welcomed the great and good of Georgian society into their home. It’s still open to visitors “at a rather reasonable rate, out of season”, Sarah knowingly jokes to the audience.
Such deft meta turns are speckled throughout Katie Elin-Salt and Eleri B Jones’s Celebrated Virgins, which charts Butler and Ponsonby’s relationship from the first tentative pangs of unarticulated love to the serenity of their eventual “silent, pensive days” spent among the roses. Although based on real events, it is noted as a reimagining of the ladies’ narrative and aims to reclaim their story on their own terms. And while the drama, like its title, is quite chaste, it is persuasively and often tenderly affecting.
Written by Elin-Salt and directed by Jones, Celebrated Virgins is performed by a cast of four with the assistance of a community ensemble. As Sarah, Heather Agyepong possesses a commanding and playful charm, and from the outset this is clearly very much her story. Her free-spiritedness is in stark contrast to Victoria John’s Eleanor, more cautious and concerned about how the world might impinge on their unconventional idyll.
Condensing the story of two extraordinary lives over the course of 50 years perhaps inevitably makes the telling a little potted. The first act feels like a succession of events, interspersed with musical longueurs that inhibit the pacing. But gears shift in the second act, partly due to the presence of the ladies’ maid, Mary Carryl – played by Emma Pallant – and the action feels far more immediate, its dramatic tensions more pressing.
The presence of the community cast is a lovely touch, a constant reminder that even these staged historical figures were also real people, determined to exist simply with dignity and grace. And at its most tender, Celebrated Virgins is a warm affirmation of lives lived authentically, and of gardens tended into bloom.
At Theatr Clwyd until 4 June.
