Often described as a ‘super-orchestra’ , it brings together outstanding musicians from the UK and abroad, including principals and leaders from other orchestras, notable soloists and members of distinguished chamber groups.
‘Sinfonia of London sets the gold standard – an orchestra of generals that takes the unfashionable, the obscure, the overlooked, and makes it unmissable.’ (The Sunday Times)
The orchestra comes together for special projects throughout the year, including concerts and recordings, to create exceptional musical experiences.
John Wilson and Sinfonia of London performing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s greatest hits at one of the finest Symphomy hall in the world promised to be a musical extravaganza and delivered.
From the opening overture the lush sonic sound bathed us in is magnificence before the special guest soloists Louise Dearman, Nathaniel Hackmann & Scarlett Strallen arrive to work their magic
The concert included music from “South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music,” “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” and “The King and I.” The performance showcased a number of popular songs like “Lady and the Tramp”
Louise Dearman was terrific in the comic standard- to keep my love alive
Scarlet Strallen mdd Julie Andrews a distant memory with her take on Sound of Music
There was barely a dry eye in the house for Nathaniel Hackmann’s emotional “You’ll Never walk Alone”
Wilson’s decision to resurrect , reappraise and rearrange and represent Rodgers and Hammerstein’s back catalogue was fully vindicated , my only gripe was that the first half was a full hour, while the second half struggled to surpass the forty minute mark- we wanted more!
This is not a conventional review. Everyone knows the story, most have seen the film. There is an acting cast of upwards of forty including rotation and a band of several. Director Emily Armstrong has had to morph into Ridley Scott to deal with this enormous cast and crew. I couldn’t possibly name check everyone.
Does she succeed? Yes she does.
As with Annie, Oliver, and the King and I, a large cast of children helps enormously with ticket sales, tonight the House was sold out. Yet although a commercial banker, artistically it is a bit of a minefield. The film has mountains and numerous locations, an amateur production does not. But what is present is a catalogue of some of the best and most loved songs in musical theatre. Armstrong ensures she wrings every ounce of magic from them. The stage set team opt for a surreal impressionist backdrop.
More challenging is the central theme of the rise of the Far Right, a phenomena emerging in the Uk with reform , and in Europe. The message that acquiescence is not the answer is not dodged. Swastikas fly ominously
Pivotal to the show’s success is the casting of Amy Davies as Maria who channels her inner Julie Andrews to the maximum, but in a 2025 way. Fey, demure, frustrated, unfulfilled, lustful; all of those emotions are neatly deployed.
Opposite her Paul Westood is a pleasing Captain Von Trapp, initially stiff, then lovelorn.
Star of the supporting cast is Liz Berriman as the Mother Abbess. The first half, on the warmest evening of the year, was a remarkable 95 minutes. Using the railway, it is possible to climb Mount Snowdon in half that time and the Germans would surely have made Paris, Stalingrad and Warsaw in that time too. Yet just as the heat and time were starting to overwhelm, Liz steps up and gloriously exhorts us to “Climb Every Mountain” and we made it to the interval! And everything is alright.
My other favourite supporting cast actor was, Nick Snowdon as Quisling Max Detweiler who almost evoked the biggest laugh of the night when a slip of the tongue meant that he announced that Von Trapp was joining the Royal rather than German navy! The much shorter, 50 minute second half whizzed by. I can be a miserable curmudgeon, but even I had a tear in my eye when the children sang ” So long Farewell Aufwiedersehn Goodnight”
All in all a hugely enjoyable evening with the band miraculously playing from the cafeteria through lack of space yet still sounding great. The Von Trapps will continue to avoid the Nazis until Saturday 28th June.
A criticism that could never be levelled at Derby Theatre is that it is predictable and boring. Next year we have the Classic Macbeth, tonight we had Kiss me Quickstep a contemporaneous tilt at dramatizing the modern media interest in ballroom dancing.
Even better it is in the hands of prolific local playwright and literary polymath Nottingham’s Amanda Whittington. Her plays tend to focus on a female perspective and there is plenty for her to have a go at here with sequins galore, fabulous frocks, fixed smiles, fake tan and the backstage bitching of competitive ballroom dancing. The wardrobe department will rarely have been busier.
Three couples take centre stage in a production sharply directed by Theresa Heskin which has the razzle dazzle to the fore.
The cast feature Russian Luka Kralj, who has come from Russia to compete in the championships, and his partner Nancy Knight, in training since she was three, aided and abetted by her rich dad, Mick, who is determined to bankroll her dreams.
Jodie and Justin Atherton overcome a car breakdown to stagger in. Lee Hart and Samantha Shaw, sashay and swagger as favourites for the title.
There is little to fault the acting in Theresa Heskins’s production. Hannah Edwards is engaging as Nancy, especially when she sticks to her principles. There is tension towards the end when she clashes with her win-at-all-costs dad, played with vigour and credibility by Jack Lord. Isaac Stanmore gives an impressive portrayal of Luka whose focus on perfection is matched by his persuasive Russian accent.
Abigail Moore and Matt Crosby are arresting as Jodie and Justin, the couple whose motives for taking part in the competition change more times than Jodie swaps her costume. They are probably the finest dancers too, admirably strutting their stuff in both the ballroom and Latin sections.
Amy Barnes is captivating as Samantha, the envied dancer who has appeared twice on the cover of Dancing Times but who swigs vodka as she struggles to find her real self. Ed White shines as Lee who feels his drive and ambition are far more important than Samantha’s self-doubt. As he says, “competitive dancing is not about confidence. It’s the illusion of confidence. And you can create that.”
When members of a community ensemble from the Academy for Theatre Arts take to the floor, there are 11 couples displaying their talents at one time. The dance routines are little short of extraordinary. There’s a winsome waltz, a tingling tango, a sizzling samba and a pulsating paso doble.
The dance routines are dazzling, the script stitches it all together, no-one puts a foot wrong.
Not only is Earl Slick my favourite Bowie guitarist, he is also one of my favourite all time guitarists. So my expectations of this book were high. Fortunately, I was not disappointed.
licks credits read like excerpts from a compendium of contemporary music. from John Lennon to the New York Dolls – but it was his association with David that defined him he was barely out of his teens when David Bowie hired him to play guitar on the ground-breaking 1974 Diamond Dogs tour. a relationship that would endure through thick and thin for the next forty years playing on Young Americans, Station to Station and the 2013 comeback, The Next Day, Slick played on the tour that followed Bowie’s hit Let’s Dance album and was at his side for the epic Glastonbury show in 2000.
Other collaborations read like a roll call of rock ‘n’ roll royalty including Mick Jagger, The Cure, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Joe Cocker, Buddy Guy, Ian Hunter, David Coverdale and Eric Clapton. And in the ‘80s he became an MTV star in his own right with the success of Phantom, Rocker and Slick. Through it all he lived the rock ‘n’ roll life to the hilt, until it nearly killed him.
The wise decision to use musician and journalist Jeff Slate to write the book with him pays dividends. It is lucid, chronological and insightful professionally musically and personally. It does not rely upon salacious gossip, the raw truth is powerful, and interesting enough.
My favourite woman of mystery Coco not only organised auditions, but also sometimes ran them. Slick overdubbed Ronson’s lead guitar on the Ziggy Stardust motion picture album on “Width of a circle” due to technical issues on the original recording. ( check out the versions on “David Live” and “The motion picture album”.Drug use was so endemic amongst the touring party that Slick was “snowballing” taking cocaine and heroin. He cannot remember the “Across the universe” session he was so out of it ( most of us are keen to forget it too). He was amongst the mutineers for the recording of the David Live Album when they arrived to find recording equipment and vans- but no payment proposals for the album. Despite several contractual/ financial spats his admiration for, and desire to play with, David never diminished. I could not help but reflect that Ronson could have learned much from Slick in his business dealings.
A fine book and must for all Bowie fans. Slik closes by saying that his epitaph was written on the liner notes to Station to Station :
As a past Staffordshire Poet laureate I have always been fascinated by George Heath, the gifted poet who died aged only 25 years old of “Consumption” or what we call Tuberculosis a major killer up until the early 20th century.
Originally, nobody knew what caused the various forms of tuberculosis, so called from tubercle bacillus (usually the offending microbes are specifically Mycobacterium tuberculosis).
The word “tuberculosis” was coined by Johann Lukas Schönle in 1839, from the Latin “tuberculum,” meaning “small, swelling bump or pimple.” However, it wouldn’t be until 1882 when Dr. Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1905, that the name “tuberculosis” began being exclusively used to refer to the disease formerly popularly known as consumption.
The microbes that cause the disease have been around for at least 15,000-20,000 years with known human deaths being caused by the bacteria dating back at least as far as 5,000 years ago, so the current name is an extremely recent moniker relative to how long the disease has been around.
The much older name originally came from the ancient Greeks who called the disease something meaning “consumption,” “phthisis,” specifically referring to pulmonary tuberculosis, with the earliest references to this being in 460 BC.
The “father of Western medicine,” Hippocrates, estimated that phthisis was the most widespread disease of his age. He further told his students that they shouldn’t attempt to treat patients in the last stages of phthisis, as they were sure to die and it would ruin his protégés’ reputation as healers if they made a practice of attempting to heal such individuals.
The disease seemed to consume the individual, with their weight drastically dropping as the disease progressed.
St Michaels Church Horton is beautifully located even if the building itself is routine. A Parish church built in C15 with C17 alterations and largely internal circa 1864 restoration by Sugden. Coursed sandstone; red tile roof to nave and chancel, with verge parapets.
The Victorians loved their Church cemetries. This one is atypical.
Serena Trowbridge ( Reader in Victorian Literature, Birmingham City University) writes:
” Victorians ritualised death. Black mourning clothes were worn for set periods of time after bereavement, the length of time depending on the relationship. After this, grey or purple would then be worn. Jewellery was made of the hair of the deceased and photographs were taken of the corpse with their family. Curtains in the house were drawn after a death, and the bell and door-knocker muffled.
The Victorian attitude to death was epitomised by the public mourning of Prince Albert in 1861. Queen Victoria’s consolation, beside the Bible, was the reading of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1849), a long poem which explores the undulating patterns of grief. Victoria’s response to the poem exemplifies the Victorian approach to death, in which the dead are mourned and memorialised rather than seen as lost forever. This Christian approach is also reflected in the graveyards of the period.
From 1832 or 1841, cemeteries were constructed around London to cope with the growing problem of the burial of the dead. Cremation was rare and seen as unacceptable, and existing graveyards were overflowing, with coffins often stacked up.
Perhaps the most famous of these London cemeteries is Highgate, opened in 1839. It became the resting place for many famous figures, including the author George Eliot, the poet Christina Rossetti, and members of Dickens’ family.
Another cemetery, at Brookwood in Surrey, was opened in 1854 after the cholera epidemic of 1848-9 overwhelmed the system. It was served by the London Necropolis Railway, which ran trains from Waterloo carrying mourners and coffins. The Necropolis Railway emphasised the class-bound nature of death and mourning, with carriages and waiting rooms (which doubled as funeral parlours) divided into first, second and third class.
Sacred space
Graveyards offered a sacred space for bereaved families to reflect on their losses. This encounter between the living and the dead provides one of the most famous scenes in Victorian literature, when young orphan Pip visits the graves of his family in the opening pages of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861).
Pip explains how his images of his family were formed by their tombstones:
The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.
The site of the burial of the dead also proves a turning point for Pip’s future. He is surprised by the appearance of “a fearful man”, Magwitch, who demands Pip’s help. The child’s terrified acquiescence alters the course of his life in ways he does not yet fully understand.
This tendency to situate significant encounters among the dead is widespread in Victorian fiction. In The Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie Collins, a key encounter between the hero and the elusive woman in white takes place in a graveyard:
Under the wan wild evening light, that woman and I were met together again, a grave between us, the dead about us, the lonesome hills closing us round on every side.
As the hero-narrator points out, “the lifelong interests which might hang suspended on the next chance words” make him anxious and add drama to an already tense scene.
As spaces charged with emotion, then, in which one may reflect on one’s own future as well as past, graveyards provide a fruitful literary backdrop. Thomas Hardy uses this concept regularly, notably in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), in which the tombs of the heroine’s supposed ancestors provide uncomfortable settings for several encounters with her past and present, leading to her ultimate downfall.
Death and resurrection
Death was not an end for the majority of Victorians, but the beginning of a new future. As Tennyson wrote in his poem “Crossing the Bar”:
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the Bar.
The conviction in resurrection and ascension to Heaven which sustained the mourners was accompanied by a growing interest in séances and spiritualism as a way to remain in contact with the dead, and of course the graveyard consequently featured in many ghost stories.
Truth is even stranger, however. In 1869, the body of Elizabeth Siddal, painter and poet, was exhumed by firelight in Highgate Cemetery, to recover the manuscripts of poems tossed in with her body by her grieving husband, the Pre-Raphelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. it was said that her body was perfectly preserved, and that her red hair had continued growing and filled the coffin.
The worm-eaten manuscripts are now in the British Library, and it has been suggested that Siddal’s exhumation inspired Bram Stoker in his portrayal of Lucy Westenra in Dracula (1897).
Graveyards are a place where different human concerns meet: sadness, loss, history, tragedy, and uncertainty for the future. Yet these fictional graveyard encounters contain seeds of hope, in which the characters move from loss to a brighter future.
“George Heath was born in the village of Gratton in the Staffordshire Moorlands in 1844.
Educated at the village school, he worked on his father’s farm, then was apprenticed to a builder.
While working on the church in the neighbouring village of Horton, he caught a chill which developed into consumption and he died five years later at the age of 25.
…He was also a poet. During his brief lifetime he achieved little more than local fame as ‘the Moorland Poet’…
He was also a poet. During his brief lifetime he achieved little more than local fame as ‘the Moorland Poet’ and ‘the Invalid Poet’.
He published two slim volumes of verse but after his death his friends produced an edition of his poems and also arranged for a memorial stone to be erected over his grave in Horton churchyard.
Death and the frustration of unfulfilled ambition are the two major themes of his poetry, and the epitaph on his gravestone (quoted above) reveals his own belief that his work would be forgotten. Hopefully he will be proved wrong.”
I have previously mentioned a new book by veteran British music PR Alan Edwards ( I was there) which sheds light on his life with some of the biggest names in music, including David Bowie, the Spice Girls and Amy Winehouse.
I invariably find that books not exclusively about David can be amongst the most informative. I was impressed by how David stood shoulder to shoulder alongside the best artists he had worked with .I also had no idea how knowledgeable David was about the Press in general and his skill in getting what he wanted. Curiously Coco gets a free pass. Not a bad word said. I highly recommend it.
This time around it was the turn of Suzi Ronson and her book “Me and Mr Jones”. Although I review professionally I bought the book with my own money!
I approached Suzi’ Ronson’s “Me and Mr Jones” with some trepidation. There were obvious elephant traps galore but overall I was pleasantly surprised.
Firstly, it is sharp and well written, I suspect a testament to the editing team at Faber. The reality is that she only knew David for a brief period of time, firstly as part of his broader social set with Angie, and then intimately on tour with him for Ziggy.
I was not that interested in, or bothered about her unremarkable, atypical home life or nascent career as a hairdresser. I did enjoy her tales of the louche, bohemian, dissolute lifestyle at Hadon Hall. Her admission that she had slept with David felt designed to give her story credibility, and she was at pains to point out that it was ok with Angie. So she “had” the lead guitarist and singer with the band…, she has to work hard to steer this away from being a groupie’s tale. And yet her good fortune is told humbly. One good haircut creates Ziggy for David and the band, and soon she is their stylist and hold of the backstage to onstage torch from which she swears to keep confidences untold. And yet there is a pretty unedifying explicit tale of David rapaciously devouring a young man whom she had been instructed to lure out of the crowd in the back seat of his limo n she presents his time with rhe LA “Baby squad” as a matter of record.
Curiously, underpinning all of this is Tony Defries’ managerial brilliance, and any idea that David was living a life of penury patently untrue.
Obviously she has the inside track on the firing of the Spiders via an overheard conversation.
Once Mick is fired, there is no more “Me and Mr Jones” but several interesting lines of exploration are squandered. The Hunter/ Ronson nexus is defined by how much she liked Ian and his wife, the premature abandonment of the project blamed on the management deal that Mick had signed with Defries. The musical background is pretty much ignored- perhaps she didn’t know?
She is stronger on the background to Mick and Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, however her gripe that she was not invited on the first part of the tour seems churlish. The musical and ephemeral anecdotes are strong, engaging ,and well told and worth the purchase in their own right including a great story about the two tour bus caravan and Bobs’ Winnebago in which he inadvertently left his dog tied to a tree a hundred miles back and had to send a biker to recover the dog.
Shockingly she reveals that Mick ended up owing Mainman money for the Rolling thunder tour he spent so much on drink, drugs gambling and assorted expenses. Is this DeFries at his worst? Or were Mick and Suzi, both grown ups, hopeless at managing their financial affairs?
Overall a good read, well written. The book ends abruptly with a cursory mention of Mick’s passing which disappointed me, Bowie fans are Ronson fans. No mention of Lisa Ronson ( recently of Holy Holy Fame) either and she is such a talent. Loved hearing her sing “Lady Stardust”, and friends I believe with Morgan Visconti. Mick’s farewell on the big stage at the Freddie Mercury tribute when he played , majestically , with Bowie and Hunter on “Dudes” is not mentioned. It appears that post the Spiders schism, she hasn’t heard from David at all. But the book is billed to be about her and David- so it meets its objectives.
A London Classic theatre production. LCT have performed for twenty five years, this is their 49th Uk tour and their third Ayckbourn play . “Just Between Ourselves” was premiered in 1976, almost a half century ago and hasn’t been toured professionally for fifteen years. One of 91 Aykbourn plays, it certainly deserves a dusting down and re-evaluation.
It features 5 birthdays, 2 unhappy marriages and 1 possessive mother as two couples marriages come under the spotlight and the specific glare of a possessive, domineering mother/mother-in-law, Marjorie.
Connie Walker as Marjorie dominates ; not only the characters, but the play itself. Her son comments that Scorpios ( Marjorie’s star sign )are secretive, scheming and devious.- a neat character summary as the tale teeters between tragedy and comedy , comedy realised with acute, astute observations on the human condition which are painfully accurate. Tom Richardson (Dennis) is trying to sell a wrecked mini to Joseph Clowser (Neil) whose wife Helen Phillips (Pam) is indifferent to all around. Holly Smith ( Vera) is a bigger wreck than the mini. Physically the set by Liz Wright looks a little chaotic yet with lovely touches including swirly orange and brown garden chairs and a floral tea set, It could only be the 1970s. The costuming is gloriously spot on . Voluminous flapping flares, sensible plaid skirts and stripey jumpers abound.
Director Michael Cabot skilfully draws the omnipresent underlying tensions and hostility to the surface allowing each actor to turn their character inside out. It is 1976, Dennis tinkers in his garage, and over a course of twelve months as he attends to a mechanical breakdown he is oblivious to wife his Vera’s impending emotional breakdown. Marjorie hovers in the background, making tea and finding fault while hypochondriac friend Neil has planned a birthday surprise for his wife, Pam, who is less than enthusiastic.
The first half, featuring the men feels ungainly, however when the women enter the fray in act two , the pace accelerates. Gender roles and dynamics have moved on in the past fifty years ,so the liberation the women seek feel a little discordant. The bumbling macho male tropes seem similarly dated, the psychiatric problems awkward, with the misogyny and bullying uneasy laughs. Nonetheless Dennis is enjoyably frenetic in a way that basil Fawlty fans would appreciate and Helen Phillips as Pam give an alluring pleasing performance.
Poignant, potent, wry and funny this is a worthy revival and runs until sat 17th May before continuing on nationwide tour.
I am a big sword and sandals fan and loved the first film. This sequel turned out to be both impressive and a disappointment at the same time
It is a lazy reheating of the first film, copying, but not improving upon the original. If you’ve seen the first one, you’ll quickly realize that you’re watching something you’ve already seen. And once something becomes a repetition of something great, it’s almost impossible to recapture that same level of greatness. Mescal, Washington, and the rest of the cast do their best, but this movie relies heavily on nostalgia.Denzel Washington’s portrayal is noteworthy, but his American accent felt somewhat out of place within the context of the film. It occasionally detracted from the immersion, making it harder to connect with his character fully.
For the most part, it repeats the structure of the original story and follows all the clichés typical of sword-and-sandal films: the plot, the betrayal, the arena fights-you name it. The irony is that people who haven’t seen the first one will probably enjoy this movie far more than those who remember the original.
The opening sea battle scene is terrific, the denouement at the close is not.
This drama as a television series made an enormous impact upon me as a young man in my early 20’s. In my memory it stands out as one of the finest social dramas I have ever seen. Originally written in the late 1970’s, but first televised in 1982, it came to encapsulate the despair of the early Thatcher Era. Alan Bleasdale’s original five episodes were just that, episodic and didn’t have a central narrative. James Graham has taken on the daunting task of adapting it for stage and reimagining it for an audience forty years on.
He has created a visceral tour de force as powerful as anything I have seen at Derby Theatre in the last decade eclipsing even “Brassed off”
The totemic figure of the drama is Yosser Hughes, originally played by the late Bernard Hill on television, now on stage by Barry Sloane
How do you adapt one of the all time great British TV series of the ‘80s for the ‘20s stage? ‘Very respectfully’, is the answer offered by James Graham’s version.
A reporter once asked Bleasdale, “Is it a problem that you have never written anything as good as “Boys from the Blackstuff”?
His response: “Who Has?”
James Graham is an excellent choice as adaptor. His script is faithful, respectful, humorous, but kinetic and muscular too. His success with the Gareth Southgate drama ‘Dear England’, demonstrated his own credentials at writing popular drama. Rehashing the iconic original series into something coherent and familiar is no easy task
Dramatically the play pivots around the shredded masculinity and mental breakdown of Hughes. As our male Liverpudlian labourers endeavour to make a few bob on the sly to keep their head above water during a recession which has drowned their hopes and prospects. Hughes’ deranged and desperate catch phrases of :“Gissa job and “I can do that” still resonate today in an era when automation and artificial intelligence look set to rob a new generation of the dignity of labour. Barry Sloane as Hughes is magnificent who delivers an exhausting portrayal of a man on, then over, the edge.
However Hughes now faces a nemesis in Moss (Jamie Peacock), a young DHSS officer determined to make a name for himself. Chancellor Rachel Reeves will love him.
Kate Wasserberg’s production is authentic and minimalist with a glowering stark, industrial-style set from Amy Jane Cook.
What Wasserberg does incredibly well is to trust the characters. With spellbinding realism, Hughes is the tragic character whom Shakespeare would have been pleased to insert into one of his Tragedies. When Nathan McMullen’s Chrissie, is offered a job which he rejects for ethical reasons – his obstinate refusal to accept it in the face of his desperate wife’s fury and tears is deeply unsettling in a memorable dramatic highlight eclipse only by the slow motion balletic depiction of the Police raid on Hughes’ house. Mathew Bourne would be impressed.
On the one hand ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ is a period piece with the workforce facing 1970/s 80s mass unemployment and deindustrialisation. But its relevance is reinvented for 2025 as the Chinese look to wipe out the Scunthorpe steel works and Derby’s Rolls Royce awaits the shattering effects of Trump’s tariffs on sales and jobs. Runs at Derby until sat19th April then continues on nationwide tour. Cancel whatever else you have on and come and see this production.
This is a story with which I was already familiar. I always thought it would make a good drama and Tilted Wig and MAST productions have done it proud
It features two female lead roles, itself a rarity, two sisters Dotty and Bett played by Laura Mathews and Katherine Senior opening in in the “Spitfire” pub in 1959. Betty starts to reminisce.
They had applied to be pilots with the ATA ( air transport Auxilliary) whose role it was to deliver ( fly) new aircraft to their new home airfields. Simply qualified as pilots, the young women were then tasked with flying whatever they were given, could be a Spitfire, Hurricane, Lysnader, Mosquito , or Lancaster without navigational aids or radios, simply using the lie of the land.
Sarah Beaton’s simple set enables them to recreate their flying exploits in convincing style. Although it was a serious, responsible role, of course girls just wanna have fun and there is plenty of that too alongside sibling rivalry, and love, bright red lipstick and very stylish flying jackets. Wardrobe should keep an eye on those!
Director Sean Aydon adeptly enters the drama through the big lens of the well known story of the second world war before zooming in on the micro story of Betty and Dotty. Katherine Senior’s script skilfully presents gender equality as fact, not hectoring politics. Eamon O Dwyers sound is atmospheric, nostalgic, but never intrusive or overly sentimental. It is also subtly on point. An atmospheric musical interlude borrows from Brian Eno’s “Music for Aiports !Dot evocatively sings an excerpt from “The Trolley Song”, made famous by forces favourite Judy Garland in “Meet by in St Louis” in 1944.
The relationship between Dotty and Betty is neatly developed, yet it also explores the sheer joy and exhilaration of the freedom of flying. Stephen Moynihan succeeds in keeping a small cast visually fluid around the stage. Incredibly Peter Small’s lighting is searchlight free!
The social history of the time is remarkable. Around a million British men died in World War 1. So for World War Two only twenty years later, physical manpower was reduced, an entire tranche of men who would have been experienced, skilled workers, managers and husbands did not exist , and there was work which needed to be done. Betty and Dot’s father laments the absence of help on the farm precipitated by their absence flying.
I well remember in the 1960s seeing my Aunty Joan’s fingers stained yellow from cordite while working in an ammunition factory. How they coped with being shunted out of work to allow the men to return and work I do not know.
Bett and her sister, Dot join the ATA at the same time, much to the ire of their father. We follow their exploits in love and war, all remembered by the pair many years later, on the eve of 1960 in the Spitfire pub in which the play opens. Zany Dot embodies the can- do British bulldog , devil -may -care, spirit,
While all five players are excellent, the two sisters are the key characters.. Dot shines the brightest. Dot is a fun, can-do girl who can handle anything almost to the point of recklessness. She draws everyone into her world, including her older, more serious sister.
Jack Hulland plays Frank, the amiable pub drunk, pestering Bett to serve him another drink. Samuel Tracey plays Jimmy, who captures the romantic interest of both women who is a lightning rod for the seismic shift in gender mores. Kirsty Cox plays a kleptomaniac who would wreak havoc at a Primark today.
The show is a tight 2 hours 10 minutes including interval , inevitably the second half , after the women are trained, is pacier than the first. Senior as Dot is sensational. She has written the script, she sings, she dances, she captivates and gets to wear the sassy red dress Spitfire Girls soars until Saturday 12th April at Derby then leaves for a nationwide tour.
Garyswordz 