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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
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Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Hamish McColl.
Cast: Jerry Hall, Jill Halfpenny, June Brown, Anita Dobson, Sara Crowe, Gemma Atkinson, Jack Ryder, Richenda Carey, Jill Baker
Description: Hamish McColl directs Tim Firth's stage adaptation of the award-winning film, about a group of WI members from Yorkshire who pose nude for a charity calendar.
Times: Tue-Sat 7.30pm, mats Wed & Thu, Sat 2.30pm (extra mats Dec 22, 29, 2.30pm, extra eve perf Dec 28, no eve perfs Dec 24, 31, no perfs Dec 25, Jan 1), ends Jan 9
Price: £5-£48.50 (£1.50 per ticket booking fee donated to Leukaemia Research)
Trains: Tube: Leicester Square 
Phone: 0870850 9175
Website: www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk
Nude but not rude: Siân Phillips and Lynda Bellingham in mock Pirelli poses
There must be a few, odd people — I am one — who missed the film Calendar Girls and did not realise it was inspired by a few women who have raised almost £2 million for cancer research since 1999. This astonishing achievement renders any criticism of Tim Firth’s stage version of Calendar Girls unkind and perhaps superfluous since this comedy of English manners enjoys more than £1.5 million of advance ticket-sales. Even so, since candour should be a critic’s’ constant companion, I need warn that though the show is in part very good, what a small part it proves.
Here, however, is a chance to enjoy displays of prudery, coyness and vulgarity, a mixed cocktail of character-traits that remains forever English. I am, of course, no lady, but then you need not be one to appreciate the long, lovely, first-act climax to Hamish McColl’s rather heavy-handed production. Yorkshire Dales’ ladies, variously young and old, fat and middle-aged, all from that haven of hyper-respectability, The Women’s Institute, are discovered revealing little naked bits of themselves for a camera, set up but not really flashed by Carl Prekopp’s photographer. Nothing unseemly, not even a serious glimpse of nipple, is allowed to sully the spectacle.
What makes the situation so amusing is that every photo is composed as a female mock-up of that all-male institution, a Pirelli calendar: fun is poked at men for whom gazing at prints of naked girls is the slow route to ecstasy. Each photo shows one woman in familiar institute situations but for the nudge-nudge of slight nudity. The girls are all helped into position, jettisoning clothes behind protective covering — the flesh of Siân Phillips’s well-preserved back flashes into view but ladies’ embarrassing parts are concealed beneath tasteful arrangements of fruit, tea-cups and kettles. The women pretend to dread having their mature or fleshy flesh made into calendar fodder. Only their raucuous leader, Lynda Bellingham’s no-nonsense Chris, remains qualm-free.
Notes of pathos are powerfully struck since the women are intent on raising a memorial fund for Gary Lilburn’s dying John, husband to Patricia Hodge’s fine, poignant Annie, who keeps her grief almost under wraps. The sunflowers that finally sprout on designer Robert Jones’s rather hideous set are in tribute to John. Yet you need watch Calendar Girls with critical faculties turned off. Far too much of it sprawls in an aimless comedy-free void. Just 25 minutes of it are divine.
Until 19 September (0844 482 5140)
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
the most memorable thing about the evening was how staggeringly bad Anita Dobson was
I have never seen amateur dramatics be so appalling
it
she had a stock northern accent and pitched every single line two octaves above her normal voice range for some reason - as if that wasnt bad enough she delivered the comedy and dramatic lines in EXACTLY THE SAME WAY all evening until you are ready to scream
surley the director could have given this talentless pain a few pointers to stop her ruining what would have been a good-but not-great night
- Grahamb, london
Calendar Girls is not a great play but it is very funny and, most importantly, raising awareness and funds for a worthy cause. Lynda Bellingham, Patricia Hodge and the divine Sian Phillips give wonderful performances and Brigit Forsyth makes a suitably shocked and stuffy WI supremo. Robert Jones's gorgeous bed of sunflowers and the twilight reconciliation between Hodge and Bellingham is very beautiful, indeed. The notorious 'nude' sequence is good but nothing can beat Sian Phillips's ageing schoolteacher, Jessie, putting an uppity beautician in her place with a terrific line about nipping out to score some crack! Priceless.
- Dj, London
Having seen the film, I wondered how Tim Firth the writer was going to produce it on stage. I was impressed with the structure of the play, and in many ways it performed better than the film played. However, like the film, it was too long, and struggled to make up the time. The real drama of course was the build up to the Calender Girls' stripping off, and producing their calendar, and the success of that sales-wise. Thereafter, however, it was all downhill. We were shown scenes of some bickering between the women, ultimately laid to rest. But in truth once the girls had bared their all, (or some of their all anyway) there was no more story. No more questions to be asked. Therefore no drama. Neverthless as an evening's entertainment it achieved some. And deserves to do well.
- Roger Goldsmith, Southsea, Hants
