Bristol Hippodrome (May 2010)
As we waited to enter the theatre to see Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls it was ‘spot the man’ with the number of males significantly outnumbered by our female counterparts. However, I can assure you that every male in the audience enjoyed the show just as much.

What I love about Calendar Girls is that it is based on a true story and the film which starred Helen Mirren and Julie Walters has been successfully adapted for the stage which since 2008 has seen numerous celebrities getting their kit off just like the original Calendar Girls who have raised £2 million pounds for the Leukaemia Research Fund thanks to the WI Calendar.

 

The Calendar Girls for this production are Charlie Dimmock, Gemma Craven, Anne Charleston, Letitia Dean, Sue Holderness, Hannah Waterman and Elizabeth Bennett.

 

Hannah Waterman (Ruth) was the pick of the bunch as an extremely amusing, nerdy character. There are times throughout the show when some of the actresses would have been better projecting their voices rather than shouting.

The audience is emotionally involved throughout, from the highs of the photo shoot as each woman strips off to have her modesty covered by – buns, knitting, pianos, tea pots and marmalade the theatre is filled with laughter with the wonderful lines of ‘nude, not naked’, ‘we’re going to need considerably bigger buns’, ‘no front bottoms’ and ‘I will be spilling over until the Autumn’ – to the sadness of death.

Whilst this is a hilarious show it is also very poignant.

Worcester News - Nigel Wilson

 

London's West End (November 2009)
Calendar Girls, based on the popular film and telling the true story of a WI group in the Yorkshire Dales who raised a fortune for charity by stripping off for a cheeky calendar, is becoming a West End fixture.

It began life in Chichester last year, toured triumphantly and is now on its third cast at the Noël Coward. On a damp Tuesday night the theatre was packed and the response uproarious. Needless to say, many of the critics have been snooty about the show.

This is unashamedly populist theatre – a touch formulaic, by turns funny and sentimental, and never digging too deeply into its characters in case the mood becomes too sad or sour. But Calendar Girls, with a script by Tim Firth who also co-wrote the movie, achieves exactly what it sets out to do. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, and it leaves you feeling better about life than you did when you entered the theatre.

To knock such a successful, well-meaning, and generous-hearted show just because it isn’t as subtle or as profound as Chekhov strikes me as absurd.

The producers David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers take a particular pride in eye-catching casting. Though she was indisposed on the night I saw the show, the great Julie Goodyear, so magnificent for so long as Bet Lynch in Coronation Street, will soon be back on stage as the good-hearted church organist, Cora. The former newsreader Jan Leeming has a cameo role as a snobbish member of the local aristocracy, while Kelly Brook, former model and TV presenter and once voted the sexiest woman in the world, has taken over from Jerry Hall as the WI eye-candy.

It’s true that Miss Brook seems to find it pretty tricky to walk and talk at the same time, and she gabbles her words so badly that it is hard to discern even their basic sense. It is not a performance that will be troubling the scorers when it comes to judging this year’s theatre awards, but my, what a delightful eyeful Kelly Brook is, shaking her great mane of golden hair like a proud lioness and covering her modesty with iced buns during the hilarious and ingeniously staged photoshoot that is the comic highlight of Hamish McColl’s warm, affectionate production.

Janie Dee endows this jaunty show with genuine dramatic depth, bringing a rich mixture of grief, brave humour and a very English decency to the stage as the WI member whose husband’s death from leukaemia inspires the calendar. The play would seem mere froth without her.

There is splendid work too from former Fast Show star Arabella Weir as the good-hearted loud-mouthed Chris (and, yes, I’m afraid her bum does look big in this) and the splendid Debbie Chazen as a roly-poly housewife who spectacularly confronts the beautician who has been having an affair with her husband.

Subtle it ain’t, but in the great good cause of cheering us up in hard times, Calendar Girls is just the ticket.

The Telegraph - Charles Spencer

 

Theatre Royal, Bath

From the little that we know of him John Baker, 53, from the tiny village of Cracoe in Yorkshire would have been only too delighted that from the tragedy of his death so much fun, laughter and affection had been generated.

John's death inspired members of the local WI to be photographed nude amongst baskets of oranges, pots of jam and plates of cup cakes for a Pirelli style calendar that would raise money for new seating at John's old cancer hospital.

The story of how an unlikely assortment of women hit the headlines all around the world with their then totally novel idea was first told on film which brought laughter and tears to the screen in about equal proportions.

Now they have made a stage play of the story and, in terms of entertainment, it has about everything you could ever hope for from an evening out.

It is funny, sad, heartwarming, uplifting, inspirational and when the curtain finally comes down at the end of the evening, you feel you've found and lost a group of close friends.

Leaving aside for a moment John and the original WI ladies, the key to the success of the evening is in the mix of 'girls' who tell the story and they include Lynda Bellingham, Patricia Hodge, Sian Phillips and a host of others. They look as if they are all having a great time on stage and that comes across loud and clear – at least as far back as row C in the Royal Circle.

The packed audience went along determined to enjoy themselves – and we did. The show is everything it is cracked up to be and more. Pity there are only standby and standing tickets available. But, I am sure I speak for most people there on Monday when I say that we would not have missed seeing the show even if it had meant standing all evening.

Christopher Hansford

Cambridge
You probably need to join the queue for returns if you haven’t already booked your seats in Cambridge this week, though the play goes to the Theatre Royal, Norwich during its eight-week resumed tour in spring 2009. Tim Firth’s stage adaptation of the film he co-scripted is, as we all know, based on a real-life story; a personal tragedy which became a national triumph.

A member of a Yorkshire branch of the Women’s Institute lost her husband to lymphoma ten years ago. From his expressed desire to live long enough to see his favourite sunflowers bloom once more came the seed of a calendar with a difference. Jam and “Jerusalem”, cup-cakes and country crafts would never seem to be staples of the organisation in quite the same way again. As only to be expected, not everyone approved.

Hamish McColl’s production keeps us inside the village hall where the WI holds its meetings, though designer Robert Jones reminds us of the sweep of the moors outside throughout the action. McColl has assembled a very strong cast and coaxed some magnificent ensemble playing from them. The audience is involved emotionally from the very beginning, applauding each short scene as the tension builds to the actual photographic shoot for the “nude, not naked” pictures.

Then comes the interval, and the delicious cumulation of suspense, comedy and tragedy crumbles. Aftermaths never do live up to their preambles, in real life as much as in fiction, but the sourness as an element of exploitation creeps in, with commercialisation rearing its rigid plastic head, sits uncomfortably (if accurately) with what has preceded it.

Of the large cast Patricia Hodge’s Annie, so secure in her marriage, so fragmented by its end stands out as particularly moving. Then there’s Lynda Bellingham’s Chris, the get-up-and-go-with-it live wire who organises the calendar – and then has to cope with the resulting furore. If Julia Hills’s mouse of a Ruth takes some time to bristle her twitching whiskers, Elaine C Smith makes vicar’s daughter as strong a personality as she is a musician.

Gaynor Faye plays Celia, high-heeled, tight-jeaned and not really a country lass at heart. Siân Phillips as the retired school-mistress with an acerbic tongue and a golden wit has some of the best lines. It is, of course, a story mainly about women but the three men – Gary Lilburn as the doomed but never self-pitying John, Gerard McDermott as Chris’s husband Rod with a flower-shop threatened by the encroach of a supermarket giant and Carl Prekopp as two very different photographers – have their moments to take centre-stage, and seize them.

Anne Morley-Priestman

A lively, funny, heart-warming tale of an unusual group of Northern strippers – that's what The Full Monty was, and what Calendar Girls tries, in vain, to be. Even without the comparison, though, Tim Firth's play is an anecdote stretched so thin that its sentimentality and contrivance are transparent.

When a Women's Institute in Yorkshire produced a calendar showing its mature members' modesty protected only by jam jars or flowerpots, the media attention prompted a Hollywood movie. The play's manoeuvres to get the audience on side suggest the labours of a Disney operation working hard to win over an audience that frowns on artistic photography.

One method is to make the naughtiness cute. These WI ladies are overage schoolgirls, somehow compelled to take part in exercise classes and attend slide talks on vegetables. Saucy photos are a way the prankish pensioners can rebel against their stern, bossy head, who is their daughters' age. Their relaxed, earthy attitude to sex, aimed at the grey market, contrasts with the frigidity of the group's two other young women, who have wretched marriages.

If any doubts linger, there's the killer argument: cancer. The suggestion for the calendar came from the husband of a recently widowed member, and the profits went to leukaemia research. The ladies are "doing it for John", we are repeatedly told, and "John would have loved it". Worthy in real life, on the stage this is emotional blackmail and no substitute for action and character. Apart from the young neurotics, the WI members are indistinguishable salt-of-the-earth types, given to chirpy, implausible wisecracks, and the play has no raison d'être after the photoshoot halfway through (a series of tableaux staged with deft comedy by director Hamish McColl).

In the second act we are belatedly asked to become interested in the individuals, who fret, fight and make up in a half-hearted manner.

The thumping normality of Lynda Bellingham and Elaine C Smith is wearying, and Julia Hills, playing a clumsy woman, staggers about like an elephant in galoshes. But Patricia Hodge and Sian Phillips are dry and droll, and the former, as the widow, is even touching, underplaying her feelings with typical intelligence. They are not enough, however, to justify this muted hymn to female empowerment through getting your kit off.

Rhoda Koenig - The Independent

In 1998 a group of indomitable and courageous women, members of the local Yorkshire Women’s Institute, gathered in their village hall to discuss the subject of their next annual calendar and decided to dedicate it to the memory of the beloved husband and friend who had swiftly and tragically died at the age of fifty four – a victim of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Perhaps there would be enough money from the sales to buy a settee for the visitors’ room at the hospital where he had spent his last days. Their calendar changed the ‘Jam and Jerusalem’ image of the Women’s Institute, and changed their lives for ever, as well as generating around six hundred thousand pound for their cause.

In the play it is the ebullient Chris who comes up with a novel idea – instead of the usual country views or local churches – why not represent each month by posing totally naked, but using the accoutrements of the WI (cakes, teapots etc) to cover the essentials.

What attracted media attention and spread their fame world wide was the fact that these are all women of ‘a certain age’ – gravity and childbirth have taken their toll and it must have taken guts to overcome natural reluctance and bare all. Equally the actresses here on the Festival Theatre’s thrust stage are not in the first flush of youth, and it is only some very clever manipulation and arrangement of props which manages to conserve at least a modicum of their modesty.

Director Hamish McColl, well versed in comedy, emphasises the absurdity of trying to hide the ‘naughty bits’ behind iced buns or a teapot, and the performers are having such fun that the audience cannot help but warm to them and the original mission.
Lynda Bellingham is Chris – an irreverent WI member who only joined in a failed attempt to convince her mother-in-law that she was respectable – and she happily sports the most outrageous cover-up – a flowery confection which doesn’t cover much at all.

Patricia Hodge, as the bereaved Annie, is as elegant as ever, but with her Yorkshire accent giving her a more homely, friendly persona. Sian Phillips, haughtily erect and correct as teacher Jessie, has “become venomous by years of exposure to schoolchildren”, but surprises everyone by being the first to agree to the calendar – so long as there are no “front bottoms”, and Elaine C. Smith delights with her version of “a vicar’s daughter gone bad”, her predilection for jazzing up the hymns, and her revealing rear view while seated at the piano. Gaynor Faye as flighty golf playing Celia and Julia Hills as reluctant Ruth complete these ‘calendar girls’ with Brigit Forsyth the self-styled president of the group, shocked and disapproving – until she discovers it is a point gained over their rival village.

Robert Jones’s versatile set transforms from a village hall into a hill where the seeds scattered in memory of the deceased have grown into a sea of sunflowers – his favourite flower.

The story has been fictionalised, but only altered in small details, and the spirit of these amazing women shines through, with the standing ovation at the end a tribute to them as much as for the performance. The play induces a few tears along with the joy and laughter, and the original Calendar Girls – in black and each wearing a sunflower - were there to share it with us.

Sheila Connor – The British Theatre Guide

Unashamedly sentimental and full of heart and bare-faced cheek, Tim Firth's stage adaptation of his own film script, inspired by the group of Yorkshire WI members who stripped off for a charity calendar to raise money for Leukaemia Research, should rake in a bob or two itself. A West End transfer followed by a never-ending tour is surely assured for a show whose feelgood factor is sky-high and which, through its celebration of female friendship among the middle-aged and middle-class, cannily covers several bases of the theatre-going demographic.

That it does not entirely feel like a paint-by-numbers job is down to Firth's ready wit, a cast who appear to enjoy every minute, and a production by Hamish McColl of The Right Size that brings some of the techniques of 21st-century theatre to a show that might otherwise look very creaky indeed. There may be something odd in the way it makes cancer seem cosy, and its portrait of female solidarity is rosy-hued and shirks issues of ambition and fulfilment in favour of happy-ever-afters. And though it is always too tasteful to offer either real physical or emotional nakedness, McColl's production and Robert Jones's clever design has a pared-down quality that allows the emotions to flourish like the sunflowers that become the women's symbol. There is a wonderful moment when letters flutter from the sky.

Patricia Hodge brings enormous dignity to Annie, whose husband's death inspires the calendar, Lynda Bellingham is terrific as Chris, whose motives become suspect, and Siân Phillips commands the stage as the elderly school teacher, Jessie, who knows how to live. It's guff, but guff that warms the cockles of the heart.

Lyn Gardner – The Guardian

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