Ladies’ Day

Fish and Slips

Ladies’ Day

by Amanda Whittington

BCP at the OSO Arts Centre, Barnes until 11^th February

Review by Andrew Lawston

The commuters of South West London have long enjoyed a simple shared tradition.  Every morning during Royal Ascot, we feel a quiet stab of envy at everyone taking the trains out to Ascot, decked out in all their finery.  And every evening we share a quiet smile at the somewhat dishevelled state of those same racing enthusiasts as they weave their way homewards.

Amanda Whittington’s play Ladies’ Day goes some way to explaining what happens in the interim.  Set in a Yorkshire fish processing plant in 2005, four women decide to go to Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot (based in York that year), to mark Pearl leaving the factory – but not retiring, as she keeps insisting.

Over the course of a fast-paced two acts, Pearl, Shelley, Jan, and Linda gradually open up to each other about the secrets in their lives, while also crashing into shot on national television, coming very close to winning a life-changing jackpot, and consuming impressively copious amounts of wine and champagne.

The fish factory and Royal Ascot are both conveyed through a single table dressed in a white tablecloth, and other bits of furniture that come and go.  It’s a simple but effective set that focuses the audience’s attention on the performances.

The performances, most of which come complete with commendably sturdy Yorkshire accents, are immaculate.  Clare Catford is Jan, a woman who appears to have sacrificed her own happiness to raise her daughter alone.  Lizzie Williams plays the older Pearl, who seems constantly uneasy despite her apparently blissful 35 year marriage.  Ali-May Hignell’s diffident Linda is the youngest of the quartet, and if her Tony Christie obsession seems a shade unlikely at the start of the play, it later makes complete sense.  Marie Bushell plays Shelley, an apparently brashly confident woman who boasts of celebrity dalliances and who teases the other women.  All four inhabit their characters completely, and the audience becomes truly invested in their lives and dilemmas as the play progresses.

Supporting the ladies, Rodger Hayward Smith is wonderful as Joe, the kindly factory supervisor who has clearly won the heart of one of his employees.  At Ascot, David Bentley and Ashley Brown round out the cast in multiple roles.  Bentley amuses as oily racing pundit Jim McCormack, before charming as disaffected jockey Patrick.  While Ashley Brown has two broadly comic turns as a Liverpudlian ticket tout and an inebriated gambling addict, he finally hits the play’s emotional climax in a brief scene with Pearl as Barry the Bookie.

Ladies Day is very funny in places, and the whole cast keep the pace up under Jane Gough’s direction, with great comic timing from the four ladies as they banter and tease each other.  There’s a strong element of physical comedy running through the play as well, as Jan and Shelley in particular find themselves slightly the worse for wear at various points.  Their drunk acting is well-observed, and comic without ever appearing hammy, making it easier for these characters to slip into maudlin introspection.

A racecourse is a surprisingly effective setting for this play.  At any given moment, as the plot requires, characters nip to the loo, or pop to the bar, or simply get lost in the crowds, to leave the others to talk.  The accumulator bet that quietly gathers momentum in the background gives the play a solid through line, while also wrong-footing the audience.  The play isn’t about horse racing or gambling, despite Jim McCormack’s entertaining demonstration of bookies’ signals, or Pearl explaining how the odds work to the rest of the quartet.  At its heart, this is the story of the ladies themselves, out of their comfort zones at an event like Royal Ascot, they bare their souls to each other, while occasionally drowning their sorrows in champagne.

The fish factory and Royal Ascot are both conveyed through a single table dressed in a white tablecloth, and other bits of furniture that come and go.  It’s a simple but effective set that focuses the audience’s attention on the performances.  David Abel’s lighting and sound conveys both the setting and the mood with the lights focusing on characters at key moments, and a mixture of background noise at the racetrack with occasional bursts of Tony Christie during scene changes.

There’s a huge amount of attention to detail across the production from Amanda Harker’s wardrobe for both the factory and the racecourse, where the ladies’ frocks seem to inform us about their characters, to the wonderful fish props that the ladies are “trimming and packing” at the factory, which Marie Bushell uses to great comic effect to punctuate her sentences.

Running slightly under two hours, this is a brisk, slick comedy which becomes deeply poignant at unexpected moments.  All the fun and excitement of a day at the races, and you don’t even need to wear a hat.

Andrew Lawston, February 2024

Image courtesy of BCP