Calendar Girls
Noël Coward
Only When I Laugh
Arcola
Ooh dear, the critics have been terribly sniffy about Calendar Girls. This dazzlingly funny, shamelessly sentimental and utterly captivating tale of middle-aged women posing naked to raise cash for charity should have won five-star plaudits all round. But the reviews have thrown a veil over its brilliance. Why? Well, we critics dislike these schmaltzy populist confections because they deprive us of the chance to flex our intellect in public and serve up a perspicacious and polysyllabic exegesis. Ironically, though, my colleagues have not only shortchanged the show they’ve also missed the opportunity to do their brainy show-off bit — like this. The themes of Calendar Girls are rooted in ancient, universal myth. The ritual sacrifice of a ‘virgin’ (i.e., the ladies’ modesty) leads to the expiation of a tribal curse (the threat of cancer). J.G. Frazer would have given it at least two chapters. The show starts a little sluggishly and its first half-hour culminates with a comedy-of-embarrassment scene in which Chris (played with big-boobed gusto by Lynda Bellingham) receives a baking prize for a cake she bought at Marks and Sparks. Dramatically, this is small stuff but its tone — the blend of affection and mockery — is beautifully pitched. Another complaint is that the Billy Elliot, Full Monty formula is too predictable: quaintly downtrodden northerners overcome adversity and discover fulfilment. But this is no mere fictional titillation. It really happened. The ladies’ original plan was to raise 500 quid to replace the cancer unit’s dysfunctional settee, whose bristling springs pronged holes in their tights. Within a few months the campaign goes global and a letter arrives from the charity disclosing that the fund stands at £518,000. ‘Unable to find a settee at that price, even in Harrogate, we have invested in a new wing.’ The mingling of pathos and comedy here is simply unbeatable.
Every detail of Tim Firth’s burnished script has a winning professional gleam and the show’s visual highlight — the photo-shoot — is surprisingly tasteful and done with a gutsy good humour that brings out the rebellious camaraderie of the reluctant nudists. There are starry performances in every role. Siân Phillips is grandly mischievous as a retired teacher with a catty tongue. Patricia Hodge gives the show style and heart as the widow, Annie, and Brigit Forsyth is shudderingly frosty as the badminton-playing snob who ‘hates snobbereh’.Undoubtedly the fact that I hadn’t seen the film heightened my enjoyment of this show, but even so my sixth sense tells me that the West End’s newest arrival will brighten up the party for at least a year. Maybe longer.
The actor, Jack Shepherd, specialises in dark, broody, characterful roles. He also moonlights as a dramatist. Only When I Laugh, his latest play, is subtitled ‘A Class Act’ and this indecision is revealing. The script has an identity problem. Is it a rollicking broad-brush portrait of the 1950s variety circuit or an intense psychological study of a star in decline? The setting is a northern cabaret club where two acts have been allocated the Number One dressing room. It takes Shepherd ages to reach this starting point and once there he abandons the dilemma and shifts his interest to Reg Henson, a forlorn working-class clown. Henson, who makes people laugh for a living, is of course a rancid, booze-soaked pustule simmering with hatred and misanthropy. It’s a miracle that Jim Bywater manages to invest him with so much grace and panache. With a tighter focus, and fewer characters, this busy over-ambitious play might have been a fascinating tragicomedy. Bits of it are funny, bits of it are sad. But the bits fall apart into a hole, not together into a whole.
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