Like the film on which it is based, Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls is proving quite a hit with our audiences and should bring in Malta’s very worthy Hospice Malta quite a tidy sum. MADC, in collaboration with the organisation, did well to obtain the stage performance rights which became available this year.
Nanette Brimmer’s band of sisters will never forget that... they did something a little remarkable, writing for themselves a little paragraph in Malta’s theatrical history
The play itself is no great shakes. The climax at the end of the first act in which most of the cast’s female actors (I’m carefully not using the traditional ‘actresses’) take off their clothes in order to be photographed in what they claim are decorously nude poses for a calendar means that by the interval most members of the audience will have got what they came to the theatre for.
The second act is, dramatically, an anticlimax and is saved from total dullness by going back to the event that spurred these members of a Women’s Institute (WI) in Yorkshire to produce their extraordinary calendar. This is the death through leukaemia, early on in act one, of John (Paul Portelli).
John is the beloved husband of Annie (Nicola Schembri), one of the members. The last scene in the play shows the women congregating at John’s grave on the moors; a scene that bursts, in a technical coup, into a thousand sunflowers, this having been John’s favourite flower because all day it follows the sun and finds it even if it is shining weakly.
The seeds of this flower have been planted in his memory by the women and John’s optimism, even when he knows he is probably dying, puts courage into Chris (Polly March), one of the older members of the WI, and transforms her into a leader.
When Chris manages to persuade her fellow members to produce the calendar, she and the others know that they will attract the antagonism of Marie (Ninette Micallef), the institute’s director, but they go ahead after a careful consideration of the props they will use to make their nudity decorous. Helped by Laurence (Alan Paris in low key), a very tactful photographer at the local hospital to which the women wish to donate a good settee for a waiting-room, they successfully overcome the qualms most of them have.
Even Ruth (Marta Vella), perhaps the most timid in the group, conquers her fears at the last moment and does well for herself.
The scene of the actual shooting of the pictures for the calendar is easily the funniest scene in the production, and had most of the audience in fits.
It was apparent that both the director of the show (Nanette Brimmer) and the performers were ready to give the adjective ‘decorous’ a fairly generous interpretation. Shall I say that never in the Manoel’s long history have so many female performers given so much, and moreover without giving offence, save perhaps to a prude or two. Like the soldiers who fought at Agincourt in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Brimmer’s band of sisters will never forget that around the feast of Crispin Crispian (October 25, the day on which the battle of Agincourt was won) they did something a little remarkable, writing for themselves a little paragraph in Malta’s theatrical history.
In the second act, the calendar makes the women famous and attracts media publicity. This leads to friction between Chris – who is eager for the publicity her personal career has never attracted – and Annie and some of the others, who feel that they want to get on with their normal lives.
The breaking point comes when they are asked to film a television advert in which they appear nearly nude. On the day of the shooting, Annie and the others exit indignantly leaving Chris in the lurch. There is, however, a happy ending when the news arrives of the calendar’s huge sales, and a contrite Chris makes it up with Annie. This scene and the scene on the moors at John’s grave gives the piece a sentimental ending, though I suspect there was little tear-shedding in the audience.
March’s Chris is not just the leader of the group but also the best projected character, a fighter who gets her way until she goes too far. Schembri’s Annie, a good woman who is suffering from the loss of her husband, is not so nuanced as March, but her dignity stands out, and her criticism of Chris in act two may be a little cruel. But it effectively deposes Chris as the group’s leader.
Isabel Warrington’s Nora, the wryly humorous piano-player, Nicola Abela Garrett’s personable and utterly self-confident Celia, and Sue Scandlebury’s Jessie, a former teacher who got a great laugh with her line about her apparently sole sexual experience, bring liveliness to a good many scenes.
Micallef’s Marie is comically snobbish, and in her one scene Marylu Coppini as the wickedly named Lady Cravenshire holds the stage with her polished but not overdone accent and her timing as ever is excellent.
Those in the audience in tonight’s final performance should not be put off by the opening ensemble scene in which the efforts made by some of the cast to create a feeling of offhand speech and possibly some nerves do not always make for clarity, for soon enough most of the cast begin to project much more satisfactorily.