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Review
A potassium-in-water mixture of the sacred and profane - Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, review
“Prepare thyself for: really rude language, flashing lights, pyrotechnics, lots of sexual references, excessive drinking, and extensive use of the smoke machine.” So runs the online advisory for “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour”, the run-away hit of the 2015 Edinburgh Festival, which then hastened on down to the National and is now in the West End, having won an Olivier for Best Comedy in April.
Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Lee Hall’s adaptation of The Sopranos, Alan Warner’s 1998 novel about six Scottish lasses from a Catholic girls school getting bevvied and going berserk on a day-trip to an Edinburgh singing competition, is a highly experimental, potassium-in-water mixture of the sacred and profane.
Sacred in that this sextet have the voices of angels – and, applied a cappella to choral classics (Bach, Handel, Mendelssohn, Vaughan Williams), those voices make you feel cleansed of all worldly sins. Profane in that for much of the 115 minutes of this almost relentlessly raucous evening, the air is saturated with expletives and banter about body parts and functions, as though a fat-berg of toilet-cubicle chat has been lobbed our way, daring us to recoil in disgust.
I have to confess that I found about 50 per cent of the show pretty tiresome – remarkably one-note in its evocation of off-the-leash, on the lash high-jinks, a bit like being stuck in a train carriage with an ever rowdier and tipsier hen party. Another 20 per cent, I’d judge borderline incomprehensible – not so much because of the strong accents of this booted, tartan-wearing army but because Hall has turned a deaf ear to critical pleas for him to strengthen the script.
The girls are introduced at a bamboozling speed worthy of Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard, and the full-on theatricality of Hall and director Vicky Featherstone’s approach means the ensemble must dart in and out of secondary characters, caricature sleaze-ball men among them. It can be hard keeping up and I never really bought the premise that this was being conducted as an ad-hoc show at the “Mantrap” night-club in Oban, to which the (only nominally school-supervised) gals head after a long-day’s misbehaviour, on the prowl for spunky submariners.
Still, that leaves a good 30 per cent that offers decent artistic succour – moments when you feel you’re getting to know, and care about, these more fragile than they seem youths, contending with sexuality confusions, background poverty, the spectre of getting up the duff without job prospects, and in the case of Isis Hainsworth’s touching Orla, the dread of recently alleviated cancer coming back.
At the end the spirited troupe break into a soulful rendition of Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross which bridges whatever generation gap or socio-cultural barriers there might be, hymning the daunting experience of growing up, and getting old. I’d say it redeems (just) the holy mess of what precedes it. But I should note that the teenage female companion I dragooned into coming started the evening by saying, “This is going to be so boring!” and came out pretty delighted. So there.
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour is playing at the Duke of York's Theatre until Sept 2. Book your tickets at tickets.telegraph.co.uk or by calling 0844 871 2118.