THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS | ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH
★★★
There’s a lush, evocative nostalgia, a post war ‘decadence’ if you like, to director Roxana Silbert’s stylish production of The Girls of Slender Means, currently playing the Lyceum. Julia Brown, Amy Kennedy, Molly McGrath, Molly Veevers and Shannon Watson sashay, skip and strut through the piece with a confident defiance. It’s a forced joie de vivre that their characters might put down to coming through WWII unscathed, physically at least, but is actually the result of tight direction by Silbert and a quite brilliant shared chemistry.
Opening in the offices of Elan fashion magazine, the story of the ‘girls’ living in the austere summer of 1945 is told in flashback. Living together in The May of Teck Club, a boarding house for young women on London’s Bayswater Road, Selina, Joanna, Jane, Anne and Pauline are determined to live their best lives, despite the poverty and desolation all around them.
That story is one of denial, of sharing clothes, getting by and adopting a frugal lifestyle… and then, revolutionary poet, anarchist, lover and army officer, Nicolas Farringdon, played by Seamus Dillane, walks into their lives.
Based on the novella of the same name by Muriel Spark, this adaptation by Gabriel Quigley is stretched over two hours. It’s only the second time the novella has been reworked for the stage, so the programme notes reveal, and as the day to day minutiae of the ‘Girls’ lives is played out, so the action meanders languidly, despite the best efforts of cast and director – there are a couple of eye-catching set pieces.
Silbert directs with flair, capturing beautifully the essence of the period as she transports her audience back in time, aided immeasurably by Jessica Worrall’s costume and set design; the former, vintage perfection, the latter, inventive and cleverly realised.
As the ‘Girls’ eking out the good times, Shannon Watson is beguiling as the ‘bubbly eccentric’ that is Pauline Fox, who not only finds herself hilariously stuck in a window at one point, allowing her deft understanding of physical comedy to provide some delightful scene-stealing, but also demonstrates a fine knack for delivering one-liners.
Molly Veevers, meanwhile, brings a nicely roguish aspect to Jane Wright, a straight talking Scot who, along with Amy Kennedy’s buoyant Anne Markham, a girl living in the shadow of her Aunt, drives the narrative. Completing the female quintet, Julia Brown is regal as the ‘terrifying’ Selina Redwood, someone never short of a good put down, while timid would be fashion designer Joanna Childe, an excellent Molly McGrath, is quietly underplayed to great effect.
In truth, as the girls rebel over the new Club wallpaper, discuss what the future might hold, bicker over whose turn it is to wear the fine Schiaparelli gown, and attempt to manipulate the men in their lives, there’s not a weak link. Each character is as fragile as she is liberated, their dreams and hopes little more than distractions from the reality of the bomb craters and destruction of life and property all around them.
So what’s not to like? Well, it’s not that the social mores of post war Britain haven’t exactly aged well, they haven’t, but it is a period piece. Nor is it that the moral attitudes displayed, then so far ahead of their time are now a given. Nor even is it that the post war politics of Britain aren’t all that different to the class and culture clashes of today. The disappointment in this adaptation of Spark’s novela is that there’s not enough of it to justify the two hour running time, indeed the dramatic denouement feels tagged on to add a frisson of threat that, until then, is wholly missing.
That said, maybe that’s the point, expose the audience to the mundanity of everyday life the ‘Girls’ use as a coping mechanism as they come to terms with the devastation of war, which is admirable, but with such a slim volume of source material, asking it to make the transfer to the stage as a two hour play is perhaps the reason this is only the second attempt to do so in 79 years. Not enough happens.
