Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by Tim Firth, directed by Marti Maraden
Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre/David Mirvish,
Royal Alexandra Theatre, Toronto
April 19-May 28, 2011
Calendar Girls is a charming, totally innocuous piece of fluff. The play, based on a real incident, is about middle-aged members of a Yorkshire Women’s Institute who raise funds for a settee for the local hospital by producing a nude calendar featuring themselves. The story was made into a movie in 2003. Then co-screenwriter Tim Firth turned the script into a play in 2008. Anyone looking for titillation will stare in vain since the “naughty bits” (to speak in the quaint mindset of the show) are laboriously hidden.
As Annie, whose husband John (Dan Lett) dies of leukaemia, Fiona Highet gives us a sensitive person whose happiness always hints at a sorrow underneath. It is to commemorate John that the group needs to raise more funds than usual. Fiona Reid gives robust life to Chris, the rebel of the group, who has the wild idea for the calendar. Rounding out the cast are Barbara Gordon as an independent, unconventional older woman; Jane Spence as a vibrant younger woman escaping the confines of her husband’s golfing circle; Kathryn Akin as the musical, life-loving vicar’s daughter; and Terri Cherniack, hilarious as a mousy, forgetful wallflower who gradually throws off her inhibitions. The group’s disapproving leader is Brigitte Robinson at her imperious best. Observing these seven interact is amusing enough in itself. Given the standard set-up-and-punchline style of Firth’s writing, it’s rather like watching a Britcom live.
The problem is that the play says what little it has to say by the end of Act 1 which climaxes with the timid, then exuberant, calendar photo shoot. Act 2 dawdles about for an hour manufacturing crises and mechanically trying to turn comedy into drama by revealing the personal troubles each woman deals with. Then, when the calendar’s sales results are released, all is forgotten. Firth can think of no other way to convey emotion than by repeatedly having characters choke up and pause while revealing secrets or reading letters aloud. Director Marti Maraden and the cast do their best to mask the author’s failures of imagination, but it’s clear that the play is far beneath the level of their talent. Since the lives of middle-aged women are so generally unexplored in recent drama, let’s hope better plays come along where such fine actors as these don’t have to hide their assets, so to speak, behind cream puffs and potted plants.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-04-21.
Photo: Fiona Highet, Terri Cherniack, Brigitte Robinson, Fiona Reid, Barbara Gordon, Jane Spence and Kathryn Akin (in front). ©Grajewski Fotograph Inc.
2011-04-21
Calendar Girls