Scott Purvis-Armour reviews 'an excellent adaptation' of the classic novel.
Every wardrobe needs an outfit for every occasion: a black dress for cocktail parties, a floral skirt for barbecues and a couture little designer number that you splurge on, wear once and spend the rest of your life paying off.
Similarly, Roxana Silbert’s sharply directed The Girls of Slender Means is a theatrical capsule wardrobe: in moments, it flirts with flamingo-coloured gowns, stitching its young women of the post-war in pink femininity, diet culture and romance; in moments, it dresses them in funereal black, unpicking their patched lives as they recover from the time-bomb trauma of the Second World War.
The play finds itself boarding with five women of the “The May of Teck”, an institution “for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of thirty years who are obliged to reside apart from their families in order to follow an Occupation in London.”
Their sororal bonds formed in the dormitories of this staid home are tested with the arrival of Nicholas Farringdon, an anarchist poet and subtle lothario who tries each of the women on for size like dressing room overcoats.
Gabriel Quigley has written what is sure to become one of the best new plays of the year. This excellent adaptation of the 1963 novel captures all the spark of Spark, painting its characters in vivid primary-colours with wit, warmth and rapport, an idea breathed to life in Jessica Worrall’s beautifully artful paperdoll design.
The lightness of the text touches on the fashion of Schiaperrelli in one breath and the scarcity of margarine rationing in the next, never becoming frivolous or overly political, but staying true to the human experience of war and recovery.
Such fine writing is a gift for the cast, and there are some exceptional performances within it.
Molly Vevers is fiery and funny as Jane, a strong saltire at the centre of this group of London “Derry Girls”. Julia Brown, too, delivers the diamond-cutting poise and pronunciation of a society woman with clarity and nuance, collapsing brilliantly when the boiled egg diets don’t fill the holes of her war wounds. As the pedantic neurotic Pauline, Shannon Watson is an understated standout whilst Molly McGrath’s observed use of gesture delivers one of the performances of the night.
Whilst the romantic subplot is - at times - a little too thin to warm the body, Roxana Gilbert’s direction of The Girls of Slender Means is one of the most enjoyable, quietly challenging and human new pieces of 2024.
The Girls of Slender Means performs at the Royal Lyceum until May 4, 2024.
Photos by Mihaela Bodlovic
RSS