STEEL MAGNOLIAS
In 1987 Robert Harling wrote a play that would go on to become a star studded film with a cast list that reads like a Hollywood Who’s Who. It is a great film with a great cast and some truly memorable performances, that is for sure. But if you have the privilege of everr getting the chance to see the original play then leap on it. The cinematic addition of the male characters, multiple locations and lavish sets and costumes as little to the whole, this heartbreaking tragi-comedy of female bonding, maternal instinct and male failings.
Set in the deep south of the USA in the late 20th century little more is required than a fine set of actors deftly directed, and perhaps a dialect coach who gets each to master that souther drawl without sacrificing clarity of diction.
Director Richard Lindfield has done an excellent job in allowing the laughs and the tears to flow with ease. There are some blisteringly funny lines for sure but not one is forced, each simply bubbling through the chatter as we learn about the lives and world of these six women whose bond is forged in a beauty shop in a converted car port each Saturday in an age when a trip to a hairdresser was a weekly necessity for the ubiquitous shampoo and set.
Sarah Edinburgh
That salon is run by Truvy and the role is joyously funny. Sarah Edinburgh is so very right in the part, her muddled bon mots pepper her speech, her worldly wisdom surviving so touchingly through the many laughs.
Isobel Peltzer Stoner
Isobel Peltzer Stoner is Shelby whose slightly air-headed, pink obsessed bride to be is soon plunged into resignation as her life is wrecked by ill health and a delicately place subplot of a marriage in which her high achieving husband is simply not pulling his weight. That thread of the story, useless men, is better served in the stage play where none of them actually appear, than in the film for sure and it secures the fact that this is a play about the female experience.
Tallulah Edinburgh
Tallulah Edinburgh plays Annelle, a born again young woman whose own personal life is in tatters, a missing husband who may or may not be a criminal and an abuser. She falls into the world of Chinquapin and the caring hands of these women whilst at the same time she becomes obsessively religious and on a mission to convert.
Charlotte Moroney
Charlotte Moroney is Clairee, the confident and successful woman in town, rich, well dressed and matriarchal. It’s a bright and balanced performance, littered with worldly wisdom and genuine kindness.
Patti Griffiths
Patti Griffiths gets the full on comedy part of Ouiser, grumpy, bitter, twisted and desperately funny. But here the role is played with a gentle touch, never once resorting to cliche, this Ouiser is far more believable than the film version which in comparison is simply a clown.
Emma Lindfield
Finally we have Emma Lindfield as M’Lynn. It’s a role that grows as the story unfolds, at the start she is the somewhat frantic mother of the bride, Shelby, attempting to hold things together as her husband, Drum, steals the neighbours magnolia blossoms, shoots the birds from the trees and her two sons wreak their own havoc. M’Lynn is the stolid survivor in the play, the sensible one with the fewest laughs to deliver, and in contrast she is entrusted with the key thread of the whole which is the burden of motherhood, from birth to the grave, the tragedy of outliving your child and balancing in her heart the knowledge the one thing that will make her daughter happy is the one thing is likely to kill her and eventually does.
BHOS are an extraordinary community theatre company who again and again achieve productions of the very highest standard in every sense, and performances from actors who would not be out of place on any professional stage.
For this production praise must also go to Michael Folkard for an excellent set making fine use of the studio space, Barbara Campbell’s well observed costumes and Wain Douglas’s wigs and hair design.
Andrew Kay
18 July
BHOS Hub
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