WE HAPPY FEW: Touring
WE HAPPY FEW: Imogen Stubbs
Malvern Theatres and Touring (Malvern till 15 November)
Tkts: 01684 892277
Runs: 3h 5m: one interval
Review: Rod Dungate, 7 November 2003
A warm, quirky play showing us a group of feisty women who can teach us all a thing or twoI'd prescribe this play when you find yourself moaning about how hard your life is, how noone really appreciates you and how you don't earn enough. WE HAPPY FEW is the story of an indomitable group of women (their leader wouldn't have allowed them to be anything else) who toured the UK before and during WW II bringing theatre to places it had never been before. The women's ups and downs, fortunes and misfortunes, their pasts and presents have the ability to make us laugh and cry in equal measures. And more importantly to pause for thought: to contemplate the strength of the human spirit to overcome adversity. All this while celebrating in a wonderfully quirky manner the very act of creating theatre.
Extracts from plays (mostly Shakespeare) are sometimes comic, sometimes surprisingly moving, individual women's stories are engaging: more than anything, the strength of this play lies in the diversity of the group as a whole and in the vigorous way its members muddle along with each other. Their very humanness is laid bare, they are vulnerable in front of us and our hearts are touched directly.
I really enjoyed this play but I nearly didn't. Half way though the first half I was about to give up on it. Just about . . . when slowly embers begin to smoulder and flames begin to catch. Imogen Stubbs, I fancy, is too much in love with her material (understandably) and it manifests itself in two ways. The play as a whole should cut straight to the chase: we're interested in the women as a group and in what they do not in the lengthy, frequently irrelevant, scenes that show us where they're coming from and how it all came about. Stubbs employs a narrator too: much of what he says albeit it charmingly is of no interest to us and what is interesting should be incorporated into the text. The narrator's interventions slow up the action when we want to get on. Stubbs and director Stephen Rayne should jointly wield a serious surgical saw.
The women's audition scene is wonderfully mad, their Macbeth sequence delicious and David Shaw-Parker's one-off speech as the Isle of Dogs mayor a comic gem. Susan Brown's intriguing Hetty (the boss) borders carefully on the bossy while never irritating us we see and feel the play through her. We long for her to have a happy ending. Marcia Warren's Flora is absolutely splendid beyond belief. She uses her upper-class accent to great effect, can be comically delicate and broad at the drop of a scarf and her second half story of her brother is an emotional high spot.
A tiny point . . . but I'd question the wisdom of finishing with Gielgud's recording from The Tempest. Leaving aside I think it's unbearably mannered, to put a male voice up-front at this point seems to undercut the value of the women's work. Why not have one of the women recorded and finish on a high note?
Hetty: Susan Brown
Joseph/ Narrator: Adam Davy
Helen: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Gertrude: Rosemary McHale
Rosalind: Marianne Oldham
Charlie: Emma Pike
Jocelyn: Helen Ryan
Reggie/ All Men: David Shaw-Parker
Ivy: Cat Simmons
Flora: Marcia Warren
Director: Stephen Rayne
Set Design: Soutra Gilmour
Lighting: Hugh Wooldridge
Costume Design: Ronnie Dorsey
Composer: Steve Edis
Sound Design: Colin Pink
2003-11-09 12:36:43