By Tim Firth

Kingston Bagpuize Drama Group

November 2024

It’s 25 years since 11 ladies from a Yorkshire Dales Women’s Institute produced their nude calendar. Hoping to raise a few hundred £s to replace a settee in a local hospital, they raised over £6m for Leukaemia Research, spawned a 2003 Hollywood movie with Helen Mirren and inspired a Gary Barlow musical. In 2009, the professional stage show appeared. Amateur groups were encouraged to perform it from 2012, with over 500 licence applications that year. This is a story and a play gone global and viral. It’s as much a part of British culture as Pantomime, and it was interesting to see it selected by the reliably brilliant Kingston Bagpuize Drama Group for what is often their Pantomime slot.

Audiences were strong for the four performances at Southmoor Village Hall (28-30 November 2024). Perhaps the most challenging session was the Saturday matinee, when a charabanc of ladies from the local WI descended! They seemed to enjoy. As they should. For this talented and cohesive drama group brought expertise, sensitivity and fun to their small stage. Saturday night’s standing ovation was duly deserved.

The bare plot is simple and familiar. Following the death of the husband of one of the WI members, an idea takes hold to replace their typical charity calendar featuring spectacular countryside views with one of “spectacular views of the WI”. Not “naked”, as Chris, their leader puts it, but artistically “nude”. The calendar is printed, despite opposition from WI bigwigs, but then commercial success strikes and evokes fracturing tensions. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that the show ends in joyful and poignantly uplifting resolution amidst a sea of sunflowers.

The 11 girls of the original story are condensed to a manageable 6 in the play, along with their autocratic and disapproving president, Marie, ably played as a bossily competitive social snob by KBDG regular Sally Lacey. The six calendar girls are all very different. From the timid Ruth with an unfaithful husband, played with sensitivity by Lucinda Ramm, to the wealthily brash Celia, upon whose disrobing the play’s most famous line is uttered: “we’re going to need considerably bigger buns!” In Claire Wheeler, KBDG cast a Celia who gloriously filled this entertaining role  – in all regards!

All six of the principals followed the playwright’s advice to “inhabit” the characters, not just play them.

Emily Eastham, despite modestly claiming in the programme that she cannot sing or play the piano, opened things with a terrific solo performance of Jerusalem, genuinely playing the piano and evoking the indomitable spirit of the WI. Her single-mother character Cora, a vicar’s daughter with fondness for drink, cigarettes and vulgarity, is famously photographed sitting nakedly at her piano. As Emily wittily remarked in her biography, the only time in 30 years she had appeared on stage without ANY underwear!

Mary Elizabeth Shewry had fun as the eldest of the “girls”, with some delightfully unexpected one-liners (“I’m going to score some crack”!)

Annie, whose husband sickens and dies from cancer early in the story, was inhabited with plausibility by Deb Didcock. This role is the hardest, demanding emotional range as she experiences grief, pride, empathy, frustration and disappointment. Her silent contemplation of the letters which came to the group from other cancer widows was a moment of theatrical power.

For this is the secret of the play’s success. If ever the cliché “bittersweet comedy” can be applied to a piece, this is it. The script makes sudden tonal turns, much like the melody of Jerusalem itself, dislocating from major to minor key. One moment the characters are larking about, the next, literally with a line, a word, a look, everything changes. Much of this hinges on the main character, Chris, who enthusiastically leads the gang, but is forced to confront her personal shortcomings as the world of celebrity intrudes. This is a play as much about exposing flawed personalities as flesh.

Paula Eastwood returned to the stage as Chris with confidence, energy and wit. In particular, she delivered the passionate, iconoclastic and deeply moving protest to the WI London Convention with authentic purpose.

Calendar Girls is a female-led piece, but the ancillary men, in the roles of dying husband, photographers and photographer’s assistant, played respectively by Mark Padbury, Rob Bateman, Richard Buss and Mike Varnom, supported the girls with impeccable comic timing. Adding to the merriment were cameos from Nicky Harris, (doubling up as a broccoli-specialist speaker at the WI as well as local aristocrat Lady Cravenshire) and Tasha Padbury delivering a neatly pitched patronising make-up artist, Elaine. Whose incriminatingly abandoned knickers Ruth found in her husband’s car – prompting a vitriolic reaction from the normally timid mouse/rabbit!

Director Sarah Curran did a great job. Not least with precision choreography of the pivotal photography scene just before the interval, when each of the 6 ladies posed individually for their shots – without revealing anything that should not be seen! Marshalling 13 actors, of which 8 or more were often on the small stage at once, was impressively accomplished. This is a technically demanding play. Backstage and production creativity are hallmarks of this group and deftly supported the fine acting. The curtain calls were raucous, as each of the six principals emerged to their individual calendar photographs being projected onto an adjacent screen.

This was a joyful, pacey production, nimble in blending humour and poignancy, and as the director desired, speaking directly of the power of community and friendship. Bravo Britain’s Women’s Institutes and bravo Kingston Bagpuize Drama Group!

Adrian McGlynn

Chairman Banbury Cross Players