By anyone's standards, the 18th Century actress Charlotte Deans was a remarkable woman. Now, 2-00 years after she roamed the North, a play in honour of her life is being staged in the communities where she performed. Women's Editor Sarah Foster reports.

THE woman standing on the stage is very young and very headstrong. It isn't far into the play when there's a heated conversation - she says she's fallen for an actor, her father rails about the scandal. The woman bravely stands her ground: she may be only 17, but she is certain of her mind. She means to marry her beloved, no matter what her father thinks. He casts her out, and so she joins the troupe of actors. It marks the start of what will be a quite extraordinary life.

The play in question, Once a Lady, tells the tale of Charlotte Deans. Though long forgotten, she once performed throughout the North, a well-known actress of her day. She lived in fascinating times - the French Revolution was under way, and all of Europe, including England, felt its impact. As many artists thought it just, to be on stage was deemed rebellious, and Charlotte trod a risky path to ply her trade. Not just an actress of renown, she was a mother of 17, and though she struggled through her life, she lived to 90. It's no surprise that Maureen Lawrence was moved to use her for a play.

"In 1984, a reprint of a memoir she wrote herself which was published in 1838 came out again. So I read this story that was sent to me and I thought it was amazing," says the playwright, who lives in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. "I thought it would make a really fantastic play."

Yet things were not to be straightforward. The play was written - but only after 20 years. "Nothing happened for a long time because, of course, it costs quite a lot of money to put a play on and the company of the colleague who originally sent it to me lost its grant under Thatcher," says Maureen archly.

"I put it on a shelf and thought no more about it until I was talking in Shap (near Penrith) about another play I wrote and I alluded to the fact that 200 years ago, this actress called Charlotte Deans had come to Shap. In the Shap Memorial Hall that evening was Barbara Slack, who works for a rural touring organisation, and she said it would be fun to do her life story and follow her own original route as far as possible."

The prospect instantly appealed, not least because it seemed so fitting. "What fascinated me was that Charlotte Deans was doing a similar kind of work 200 years ago," says Maureen. "I myself and companies like Deans' are working in an unbroken tradition."

Once the funding was in place, she started writing Charlotte's life. She says it wasn't quite as easy as she'd thought. "What I tried to do in the play was to rediscover what it was like to be a strolling player in that period 200 years ago and to celebrate Charlotte's life, because she had an amazing vitality and an amazing record of success at small venues," says Maureen. "I thought it would be easy to write but as I found out, it wasn't easy because a memoir is full of little details and it often doesn't have a dramatic thrust to it."

What was at least beyond all doubt was that the memoir was authentic - a local poet, Frances Marshall, had taken pains to check the facts. As Maureen studied it in depth, she came to know its author well. "She was the daughter of a solicitor in Wigton, near Carlisle, and she was a well brought up, fairly well educated girl," begins Maureen. "When she was 17, she saw a group of actors in her home town, travelling players, and she fell in love and had a rapid romance with one of them. She was forbidden to talk to him because actors were not respectable people - they lived vagabond lives outside the law, really. It was a very dreadful thing she did, so she was disinherited and lived and acted with the company, with no family to fall back on."

Despite the risk of being abandoned and ending up becoming a prostitute - a likely outcome for an actress - things turned out well and she got married. But when her husband died she faced a problem. At 35, and with six children, she had to find another man. "She joined a theatre company and very quickly found another husband because she couldn't really travel as an actress without a man," says Maureen. "She continued travelling and touring with Thomas Deans, walking from village to village and town to town throughout the north of England and in Scotland."

She faced great hardships on the way, and often found herself disparaged. It was a wild, nomadic life. "There were robbers, smugglers and people who tried to put them in the stocks because it wasn't respectable to walk on a Sunday in Scotland because of the presbyterians," says Maureen. "They were nearly washed away by rivers when they were fording them - they had to carry their theatre stuff and their children on their heads. Charlotte must have had enormous strength of character, enormous determination. She was not a sturdy peasant, she was a well brought up, gentle person, so it was her fortitude that supported her through all this."

What gives her story added depth is its political dimension. Her plays were seen as being seditionary. "She lived through the French Revolution and lots of the actors and people who were literary were very supportive of the French - Wordsworth went to support them in Paris," says Maureen. "Artists were dangerous because their work could be inflammatory. Charlotte's company performed a very famous play called The Robbers by Schiller about the need for revolution, so they were playing with fire."

It isn't clear if Charlotte really was an activist or merely going with the tide. She did, however, learn much of life from her adventures. "What she does say is things like 'the miners have rough, crude exteriors but warm, cordial hearts'," says Maureen. "'They were rich seams of human goodness' - those were her words, so clearly she was pro the working people. She also says in another section 'the Christians were too religious to let us go to the devil in our own way but not Christian enough to feed us'. These were criticisms of the status quo, so you have to make up your own mind about what she says."

She may have led a vibrant life, yet Charlotte never thought to log it for posterity - she wrote her memoirs to raise funds for her retirement. She left the stage when she was 70, and quite remarkably for the time, lived another 20 years. If nothing else comes of the play, it's clear that Charlotte has an ardent fan in Maureen. "She was such an amazing person to do all that at that time," she says. "She was a survivor."

* Once a Lady will be performed at The Witham Hall, Barnard Castle, on Sunday at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £7 at the door or £6 in advance, with concessions available, and can be booked by calling 01833-631107.

A writing and photography project entitled What's Your Story?, inviting accounts of rural life, is running alongside the play. To get involved, call 017683-53954.