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The Big Day

Theatre 118, Glasgow 

Four stars

 

It was all Sheena Easton’s fault. If the Bellshill diva hadn’t made her prodigal’s return to Glasgow for 1990’s free concert, The Big Day, in possession of a transatlantic accent, the girl gang at the centre of Milly Sweeney’s play wouldn’t have ended up in a police holding cell. 

 

To rewind for those who might not have been there, The Big Day brought a quarter of a million people out onto the streets of Glasgow to see some of Scotland’s biggest pop acts of the era, including Texas, Deacon Blue, Hue and Cry and Wet Wet Wet. Coming in the thick of the city’s year as European City of Culture, it also made a statement about Glasgow’s homegrown renaissance. As big and shiny a PR exercise as it might have been, most of the acts had working class roots. 

 

Hence the disgust of Debs, Fiona, Gracie and Kirsty regarding Ms. Easton’s grand entrance. Having grown up beside each other on the same estate, this is the first time the girls have seem each other for ages. Only Debs has managed to move away, but with a death in Kirsty’s family and Gracie talking of marriage, life is suddenly taking a grown up turn. Trust Fiona to cause a commotion, which is how they meet Louise, who ends up sharing a cell with them all for a very different reason. 

 

There is a lot packed in to Lucy Pederson’s production, presented by the shoestring Pure Class Theatre Company, set up by graduates of Edinburgh’s Napier University. Sweeney’s play not only looks at the personal growing pains of the onstage quintet, but, set in Thatcher’s Britain, it raises the all too real spectres of factory closures, homelessness and political failure. There is too the everyday realities of what a woman on her own sometimes has to face in public spaces. 

 

This is brought to life by a sparky cast of Eva Winton as Debs, Hannah Fraser as Kirsty, Megan O’Grady as Gracie, Rebecca Munro as Louise and Sydney Mulligan as Fiona. At just fifty minutes long, Sweeney’s play resembles a Netflix pilot for a full series of adventures embarked on by her famous five. Thirty five years on from when the play is set, one wonders what became of these young women on the verge, and how things turned out beyond the day that changed everything.


The Herald, November 25th 2025

 

ends

 

 

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