Emily Berry
posted 4 August 2006

Adapted from Alan Plater's Bafta-winning TV film The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, which starred Judi Dench, Blonde Bombshells of 1943 focuses on a day in the life of an all-female swing band. Having lost half of their troupe to illicit liaisons with American GIs, the Blonde Bombshells (conspicuously brunette before donning peroxide wigs) are auditioning for replacements to perform live on the wireless that very evening.

Cue a roll call of unlikely oddballs: a gawky schoolgirl who turns out to be a marvellous clarinettist; an infuriatingly upbeat nun who opens her large and battered guitar case to remove a tiny ukulele and innocently launches into a cheeky George Formby number; and an absurdly upper class female soldier clad in khaki uniform and high heels, who's a dab hand at the trumpet despite thinking that sheet music looks like 'dear little tadpoles and little bits of string'. This 'comedy auditions' routine is a tried and tested scenario wheeled out in countless plays and films (The Full Monty, for example), which follow the same wobbly-audition-through-to-dazzling-final-performance storyline to far greater effect.

Unfortunately the bulk of the plot is rendered as an extended flashback, with the whole thing weakly framed by a present-day narrative. The play opens with a young woman (the granddaughter of Liz, the schoolgirl band member, both played by Karen Paullada) dreamily recollecting the 'lullaby' her grandmother used to sing to her as a child - 'If I Had a Ribbon Bow' - which then prompts the rest, the story of the day her grandmother learnt the song and about 'love, sex, betrayal and death'.

Don't be foolish enough to suppose that this dramatic statement presages an injection of gritty emotional realism. What exactly Liz has learnt by the end of the play about any of these things remains unclear, though she can certainly belt out the song perfectly. Her understanding of love, sex and death, perhaps, has been gleaned from the relentless innuendo of fellow band members Grace (Barbara Hockaday) and Vera (Sarah Groarke) who go out drinking every night so as 'not to waste the morning after' and chat up soldiers in order, we find out later, to drown their sorrows about their husbands, one killed in action and the other a prisoner of war. When the final band member is taken on, a draft-dodging drummer called Patrick (Chris Grahamson) who is willing to wear a dress in order to disguise himself onstage, he gives Liz her first 'proper grown-up kiss' and this, presumably, concludes her lesson. Where betrayal figures exactly, is hard to say - unless in band leader Betty's (Elizabeth Marsh) revelation of Patrick's gender live on air, causing him to be shipped off to the army, which they all applaud.

If the war is a constant and assumed presence throughout the play, the characters are too resolutely 2-D for their personal tragedies to have much, if any, emotional impact. The actors seem to have been directed to perform as if playing to a Royal Festival Hall-sized audience; most of them wearing mikes and hamming up their parts variety-show style for all they are worth - but at least they seem to be enjoying it. Perhaps they are used to playing in a larger theatre, but everything is way over the top for an auditorium this size. The show's saving grace is the big band music, full of infectious energy and enthusiasm, which certainly seems to keep the majority of this (mainly grey-haired) audience entertained. It's a shame that a rare Northern, female-led show should be so disappointing, but Blonde Bombshells is a shallow, mawkish piece, only tolerable for the nostalgia and a bit of swing.

Till 12 August 2006