“It’s a day-in-the-life piece about seven women and one man (who wears a frock some of the time) trying to become a band and play the popular music of the time.” So said the late Alan Plater, pithily summing up his 2004 stage play (adapted from his 2000 TV drama, featuring Judi Dench, Cleo Laine and others) set in wartime England.
Betty leads an all-female band that sheds players every time they play a GI base (“Oversexed!” says one; “overrated!” another). Tonight, the Bombshells are booked to play a BBC event in “a north-east coast town” (Hull). They are four short of the necessary eight. Cue auditions. What follows is schematic rather than dramatic.
Each arrival presents their skills to the jaded, wisecracking band and their backstory to the audience: enthusiastic schoolgirl Liz, on clarinet; Lily, the singing nun, lilting George Formby entendres as if they were single; hoity-toity army driver Miranda, taking no nonsense, not even from a ticking bomb; Pat boasting of dodging call up and wondering: will he need to shave his legs?
In spite of bombs and deadline, there’s never any doubt that this band of “sisters”, befrocked and bewigged, will make it to the gig on time. Zoë Waterman’s direction unfurls the action at a stately pace, while, in counterpoint, the familiar wartime numbers swish and sashay, swing, lilt and rock (terrific playing from the well-matched ensemble of actor-musicians under Greg Last’s direction).
The pleasure of the production grows from the satisfaction of an improbable agglomeration of at times antagonistic individuals achieving harmony (mainly musical) and muddling together through the intolerableness of war. Liz wonders how is it possible to concentrate on entertainment when players’ husbands are dead or missing in action. Betty lets her hard-boiled mask crack for a moment: “We laugh to stop ourselves crying.”
Blonde Bombshells of 1943 is at the Octagon theatre, Bolton, until 1 July, then touring
