Calender Girls: The stage version

Published on Sunday 28 September 2008 19:42

When the ladies of a Yorkshire town did a nude calendar for charity, it caught the public's imagination. The film of their story was a massive hit, but are people still interested enough to see a stage version?

IT SHOULD be a bonanza for actresses of a certain age. A play, tipped to be a hit, that involves both popular appeal and acting integrity. A lengthy tour in a strong ensemble of like-minded women. But then there's the catch. At some point you will have to take your clothes off.

Calendar Girls, the story of the Yorkshire Women's Institute who posed nude for a calendar to raise money for cancer research, has been adapted for the stage by Tim Firth, who wrote the screenplay for the 2003 movie. It has barely begun its UK tour, but is already looking like a hit. Audiences at its debut performances in Chichester laughed, cried and gave standing ovations. Tickets are selling like freshly made WI cakes.

A group of veteran actresses have risen to the challenge of posing artfully behind flower arrangements and cream buns, including Lynda Bellingham, Patricia Hodge, Elaine C Smith, Gaynor Faye and Sin Phillips. When I met Bellingham, Hodge and Smith backstage in Chichester, I discovered a feisty, self-assured group of ladies who aren't afraid of the odd wrinkle.

"You're never going to persuade me to have plastic surgery until everyone stops looking the same," declares Bellingham, 60. "Take California, all the noses are the same, everyone looks like a version of Pamela Anderson."

Hodge, 61, says that when she was first asked to consider the part of Annie, whose husband dies of leukaemia, inspiring the women's fundraising effort, she almost said a flat "no". "Firstly, I don't like films that go on the stage, it's a bit of a worn-out, overexploited thing at the moment, and secondly I don't want to take my clothes off. Then I read the script, which got rid of the first doubt."

Meeting the creative team rapidly dismantled the second one. "This is not about nudity, it's a play about something much bigger than that. Once I could see where they were coming from, it ceased to be a problem. And once I got over it, I never thought about it again." In the event, the nudity in the play is tasteful and minimal.

Elaine C Smith, 50, said "yes" almost immediately to the part of Cora the pianist (she batters out a mean Jerusalem) and did her thinking afterwards. "My sister's had a form of blood cancer and I've been doing a lot of fundraising for leukaemia research, and so the serendipity of that was important for me. Then I read the script and thought: 'That's right, there are going to be some nude scenes'. But I knew they would handle it well, they wouldn't have us running naked across the stage."

Bellingham, who plays Chris, the ringleader of the group, with characteristic gusto, initially flinched at the idea of disrobing. "But it's such a brilliant story, I felt I couldn't fall at the last hurdle. I have a happy knack of putting it to the back of my head and bringing it out later. In fact I bring it out every night in the play!" she chuckles throatily.

"Actually, there is so much to do in this play, it's the most difficult play I've ever done. I'm much less concerned about my body being perfect than I am about whether I've understood why Chris is insensitive, or Annie's grief. It's very demanding physically, there are so many quick costume changes."

Smith hoots with laughter: "If you want to see nakedness, you should come backstage!"

Bellingham says she initially planned to lose a stone before the tour, but rehearsal habits – and the director's penchant for Snickers bars – led to daily chocolate bars instead. The ladies developed an immediate camaraderie. "People say: Oh, you all get on? And I get cross because when did it happen that women were not able to get on? There has been real looking after each other."

They are full of admiration for the "real calendar girls" from Rylstone in Yorkshire on whom the story is based. The Rylstone women attended the opening performance and gave the play a hearty endorsement.

Bellingham says: "What they've done, these women – and you can only do it at a certain age – is turn the system around with the whole nudity business. It just shows you the power of the female being. These women who are supposedly fuddy duddy women, but they said, 'OK, what's the way to make money? Nudity.' They're not being feminist, they just saying, 'Let's be practical about this, flesh sells'."

The massive outpouring of support for their project was not only a reflection of the importance of their cause, but of a general delight that ordinary middle-aged Yorkshire women had delivered a blow to the tyranny of the body-image police.

Bellingham says: "I envy anybody who takes their clothes off willingly these days, because the perfect body, the body that they manufacture in the tabloids or in the magazines, does not exist in real life except in very rare cases. To be that thin, to look that good on camera, in real life you look like a lollipop. If you ask men, they don't equate beauty with thinness. They want women with breasts and a bit of bum.

"How odd is it that we've been doing women's lib all through the last 40 years, to end up the victims, unbelievably, of body image? We're supposed to have burned our bras, gone on the pill, done what we liked. It's unbelievable that we've ended up in this mess."

Smith hopes that the play is empowering. "I think it's liberating for women in the audience of all shapes and sizes sitting watching us. Hopefully generations of women will go out and not feel so bad about themselves."

However, it has already revealed a striking double standard. For every standing ovation there are those seemingly repulsed by the idea of seeing middle-aged female flesh on stage. In an otherwise appreciative review, Quentin Letts, theatre critic for the Daily Mail, wrote unkindly that Bellingham "put me in mind of the late King of Tonga".

"You just have to take it on the chin," says Smith. "We're all wise enough to get the gags ready before anyone else does. 'Who do you play?' 'I'm Cora the piano player. It's OK, they're getting a bigger piano.' There will be misogynistic comments, there will be people who will say, 'Who would want to go and see a group of middle-aged women take their clothes off?' And the insulting thing about that is that most of the men who say this live with middle-aged women."

The ladies say the situation for older women seeking work in television is no better than it was 20 years ago. Women newsreaders find themselves on the shelf at 40 while the men carry on working. Hodge does a wonderful impersonation of a TV advertising executive on a casting day: "This part is, like, screaming, yeah? A lot. Can you do that?" Bellingham is proud of her job as the oldest member of the team on ITV's Loose Women but finds it doesn't readily translate into work elsewhere.

Even in theatre, where 70 per cent of audiences, and 85 per cent of ticket buyers are women, artistic directors are predominantly men, staging plays by male playwrights about male experience.

"This play is about a very under-represented part of the population," says Hodge. "Women of a certain age become invisible."

At least, until they start taking their clothes off in public, and that's the hope which Calendar Girls offers. "What's really nice is that we hope the play will go on and on," says Bellingham. "If it's a success it will get put on in different theatres. There will be jobs for ladies all over the place!"

&149 Calendar Girls is at the Kings Theatre, Glasgow, 30 September until 4 October; and at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, 13-18 October