Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour
National Theatre, Dorfman, SE1
3/5

A multi-award winning sell-out at Edinburgh fringe festival last year, Our Ladies tells the story of six Catholic school choir girls who go on the lash as soon as they’ve sung their last high note.

Based on the novel The Sopranos by Alan Warner and adapted for stage by Billy Elliot author and playwright Lee Hall, the play is billed as a musical.

However, the music largely takes a back seat in showcasing the girls’ less than holy antics.

We witness their various attempts to get past the doormen at seemingly the only nightclub — appropriately dubbed the Mantrap — in their small Scottish town of Oban.

There they get drunk, get picked up by a lecherous bouncer and his socially inept mates and even manage to trip out on some mushroom lager.

This coming of age comedy reveals some deep and insightful truths about the complexities of growing up.

Kay (Karen Fishwick) is the quiet, intelligent one who is the only one in the group planning to go to university. The other girls tease her for being a geek, until they find out that she’s pregnant — a fact that might jeopardise her plans.

Fionnula (Dawn Sievewright) is the most popular girl at the school who teases Kay the most despite harbouring strong sexual feelings for her. Orla (Melissa Allan) on the other hand has cancer and she wants to lose her virginity before it kills her — hence these rich backstories that make this production about more than just the laughs.

The 13 tunes played over the 1 hour 45 minute production without interval include a mixture of classical and ELO.

Particularly good are the covers of Mr Blue Sky and Don’t Bring Me Down — these rock numbers play off with renditions of Mendelssohn’s Lift Thine Eyes, Vaughan Williams’s O Taste And See and Handel’s My Heart Is Indicting.

This dichotomy clearly symbolising the two very different lives of the girls — the institutionalised social conformist life on one hand and their rebellious desires to break free from it on the other.

While it’s not always coherently done, Our Ladies is a rollicking tale of working-class girls kicking against the pricks.

Our Ladies runs until Saturday October 1

Review by Will Stone