Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour

Take six girls, full of anger and energy and adventure as they erupt into womanhood from the strictures of a catholic girls school and you certainly have enough fuel to create an evening of ribald humour and teary distress. I knew these girls, I grew up with girls like this – but I never thought I would spend time in their company again. But last night I did, I revisited their world, one of booze and boys, of seamen and semen, and of music too. Their sweet choral voices morphing into the raucous voices and screeches of pop and rock. Lee Hall has taken Alan Warner’s book The Sopranos and made it more than real. This is an evening of irreverent behaviour, heartfelt  romanticism, violence and teenage angst delivered by an amazing cast of young women who were utterly believable throughout. In almost every way it benefited from not being delivered with the rather glitzy “West End” juke-box razz-a-ma-tazz where a thin plot is used to deliver a string of pop hits, but that said, there were a few moments where the music could have been lifted by some of that technological aural oomph, and that may be due to the venue. I suspect that it would sound much better in a more intimate setting. I certainly wanted to get up close and relive those teenage moments.
18 May
Theatre Royal Brighton
Andrew Kay
4 stars