Dundee Rep
Five stars
Like a Busby Berkeley of the Barras, Tony Roper knows how to make a memorable routine. This is why his comic masterpiece set in a 1950s Glasgow washhouse on Hogmanay where four working class women banter the night away has survived almost forty years and umpteen productions since it first appeared in 1987. Since then, it has become a bona fide contemporary classic, with bums on seats guaranteed wherever it plays.
So it goes in this big new touring production led by cast member Louise McCarthy’s Rerr Terr company in association with Neil Laidlaw Productions, Selladoor and Dundee Rep. With Roper back in the director’s chair, it isn’t hard to see why his celebration of women, community and the collective power of both retains its rapport with audiences, many of whom are likely to be as familiar with the play as the brilliant cast are here.
One mention of Galloway’s mince by old Mrs Culfeathers is enough to signal a frisson of expectancy in the Dundee Rep stalls where people know exactly what is coming next. When it arrives in a sharply portrayed interplay led by Lesley Mackie as Mrs Culfeathers and McCarthy as Dolly, and with Ali Cleland’s Magrit and Eden Barrie as Doreen fit to burst, what follows is confirmed as one of the most hysterically funny comedy masterclasses to grace a stage anywhere over the last half century.
The first half of the show has already seen the glorious phone sketch, in which Doreen’s aspirations of a house in Drumchapel, a hot bath and a life based on American movies is channelled into a fantasy future call between Doreen and Dolly. The allure of big screen glamour or a festive singsong as an escape from tenement life is captured in David Anderson’s appealingly jaunty musical numbers, while as the only male presence on stage, Paul J Corrigan’s Andy is a figure of easily ridiculed authority for the female quartet’s washhouse sorority.
Beyond the play’s music hall patter is an incisive cross-generational study of working class ambition offset by fears of old communities being broken up. Kenny Miller’s set captures the monumental grandiloquence of old Glasgow to accompany a narrative that seems sired from an Oscar Marzaroli photograph of a world about to be bulldozed away.
While on the surface Roper’s play is steeped in nostalgia for an age that becomes increasingly distant with every production, he is also historicising the collective memory of a neglected part of society and preserving its legacy. To see this brought to life with such affection is a rare treat, as the play’s hymn to that society echoes down the decades to capture audiences’ hearts anew.
ends
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