Calendar Girls by Tim Firth. The Mill at Sonning, Reading RG4 to 1 June 2024. 4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

Photo Credit: Andreas Lambis

Calendar Girls by Tim Firth. The Mill at Sonning, Reading RG4 to 1 June 2024.

4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“A well staged revival of a much loved play.”

Directed by Sally Hughes this warhorse of a play by Tim Firth based on the all star 2003 film, which he also wrote, gets a brisk and polished staging which should keep the audiences at this splendid dinner theatre at Sonning Eye near Reading content. It was also turned into a musical but the only song we get – several times – is that Women’s Institute stalwart Jerusalem. We follow how a group of Institute members set about making a nude calendar as a charity raising ploy after one of the husbands dies from cancer and how the powers that be in the Jam and Jerusalem organisation coped with the women’s decision to make the calendar and reconciled it with the rules. It also deals with how they faced up to finding themselves famous – the calendar, originally meant to raise enough to buy a sofa for the local hospital’s cancer unit, ended up earning some £5m world wide and gave them temporary fame. The nudity is neither here nor there as the photographer posed them behind various things that members of the Institute do - like baked goods, flowers, fruit and things knitted so that no naughty bits could be seen. It all fits into the “no sex please, we’re British” world of the English middle classes who like domestic tasks, making things, flower arranging and lectures on “interesting” topics while their men folk are at the golf course. The cast are adept, although they do not sound mostly as if they came from Yorkshire, and the tears – after all a much loved husband’s death has sparked the whole enterprise – are conjured up nicely along with the laughter as they bicker gently over what they will do. Calendar Girls was a passable film, albeit a very successful one, and the subsequent play enjoyed not only a West End run but an after life on tour as well as a new life in the form of the musical version with music by Gary Barlow. The Sonning show looks good, the stage has been cleverly transformed into the meeting room where the women hold their discussions, play badminton, or pose for the calendar for a somewhat embarrassed young man, and the actresses, who range from shy and young to quite mature, are an endearing bunch to spend time with. Firth did not write a great play or even a great screen play but he summed up the essence of a kind of Englishness the English middle theatre going classes love to believe is peculiarly theirs – the result is not exactly titillating but it certainly has legs. Hughes’production and cast do it full justice.

Cast

Debbie Arnold – Cora.

Bashienka Blake – Celia.

Oscar Cleaver – Lawrence.Liam.

Elizabeth Elvin – Marie.

Rachel Fielding – Chris.

Kitty Harris – Elaine/ Heather.

Clara Janson – Ruth.

Natalie Ogle –Annie.

Dawn Perllman – Brenda Holse/Lady Conservative.

Steven Pinder – Rod.

Andrew Ryan – John.

Sarah Whitlock – Jessie.

Creatives

Director – Sally Hughes.

Set Designer – Terry Parsons.

Costume Designer – Natalie Titchener.

Lighting Designer – Matthew Biss.

Graham Weymouth – Soound Design.

Izo FitzRoy – Dialect Coach.