Review: Calendar Girls at The Lowry

Oct 21 2008 Chester Chronicle

CALENDAR GIRLS/The Lowry, Salford Quays, until October 25

REVIEW/by Peggy Woodcock

IT WAS worth the wait.

The house was packed for Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls at The Lowry, Salford Quays, on Monday, so a delayed start due to technical problems was unlucky for the theatre.

But such is the good nature of the play and the all-star cast that we in the largely female audience were happy in anticipation - and even happier as the action got under way.

Based on the film, here was the stage version of a story that has become the stuff of folklore. You would have to come from Mars not to know the story of the Yorkshire WI women who decided to pose nude for a calendar to raise money for a cancer hospital in honour of a dying husband.

It was great fun. The set boasted Napley village hall against a Dales backdrop and you used your imagination as the action shifted from Jerusalem in the former to Th'ai Chi on the latter!

Firth couldn’t get all the film on stage, of course, but we had the key characters, the main story line and the same rich vein of comedy tinged with pathos.

So Chris’s M and S cake still won best in show, and Annie still cradled sunflower seeds like the love of her lost husband. Chris bellowed her hatred of jam to the Albert Hall WI assembly - and bamboozled her fellow members into taking their clothes off.

With Linda Bellingham full-on as the renegade Chris, and Patricia Hodge long-suffering as Annie, it rollicked through an hilarious first half with superb backing from Elaine C Smith as Cora, the piano-playing vicar’s daughter gone bad, Gaynor Faye as the golf-playing, glamorous Celia and Julia Hills as the shrinking Ruth.

Sian Phillips was in a class of her own as the ageing and outrageous Jessie. She had some of the best lines in the show and, boy, did she deliver them! And who else could play the stuffy, snobby, WI chairman, Marie, that Brigit Forsyth? Which she did, to perfection.

They stripped off - but oh so carefully - in a howlingly funny scene that climaxed with the famous nude tableaux, props strategically place. Into a second half, we had the back stories emerging, the two friends diverging, and eventually, a serene, happy ending.

You could quibble. Bellingham could have given some depth to her character, Hodge could have projected more, and Hills lost lines through mistiming. The undressing was clumsy and the ending had unnecessary add-ons.

Above all, we needed more WI members. Six were thin on the ground. Just a couple more would have made a big difference.

But, hey, here is a solid gold, sold out, send’em out smiling show and one great night’s entertainment. Good news for those who couldn’t get tickets - it’s back next March.