Ladies Unleashed
Performed at The Priory Theatre, Sunday 23 February 2025 (until 01 March 2025).
Director: Stuart Lawson.
The third in Amada Whittington’s Ladies trilogy found the four friends older and seemingly not much wiser as they make their way to Holy Island for the wedding of Linda (Karen Evans). Although ostensibly a comedy there was an unexpected poignancy to all the characters as the play progressed.
Karen wonderfully conveyed Linda as congenitally optimistic and enthusiastic, whereas her three friends were wearied and disappointed by Life. Nicky Main played Jan, who was immensely proud of her daughter having gone to Cambridge and been successful, yet the truth gradually emerged of an estrangement. Nicky gave a moving soliloquy as Jan wrote a letter to her daughter that she would never send.
Ruth Macallum revealed a life of regrets, a teenage marriage enforced by the social norms of the time which she was finally acknowledging had run its course many years previously. Meanwhile glamour puss Shelley [Emma Marshall], arriving late not from Australia but from Scarborough, finally confessed that her dreams had evaporated and she was doing kitchen and bar work.
Running parallel to the current Ladies story was a curious scenario of two Victorian herring fisherwomen Mabel (Alison McShane) and Daisy (Chloë Wiltshire), who both sang well, and also had aspirations, for the stage and for security through marriage, respectively. Although this dual time zone highlighted the ‘eternal story’ of the vulnerability of women’s lives it only partially worked and was at times a distraction. However it highlighted the importance of friendship.
This was perhaps the weakest and most ambitious of Whittington’s scripts, but director Stuart Lawson got the mood just right as he brought out the best from the cast and the acting with the expressiveness of all the characters. The backdrops of the Northern Lights, the sunset and rise and the starry night were breath-taking.
By the end of this comedy-drama we realised that these friends had acquired wisdom, albeit the hard way, indeed perhaps the only way.