When the audience at the Kings Theatre see Karen Dunbar get her kit off later this month, the Chewin’ The Fat star will be elsewhere in her head.
She gets through her naked scene in Calendar Girls by channelling the wee girl who played on the shore.
Karen, 48, said: “I think about being a wean running about down Ayr beach. I try to connect to that feeling I had then.”
Despite having to get naked, Karen knew she would say yes to the role in the musical version of the story of the Yorkshire women who stripped off for a cancer charity.
Single mum Cora was written specially for her by Tim Firth. Songwriter Gary Barlow, who adored her musical sketches in The Karen Dunbar show, agreed that she would be perfect for the part.
Karen recalled: “I remember reading the synopsis and it said, she’s the joker in the pack, and I thought, I’ll have that.”
Rehearsing the nude photoshoot scene was a riot. Karen had bonded with the rest of the cast, particularly Loose Women star Denise Welch.
“There were eight of us, with me and Denise Welch in total school girl hysteria. Saying things, battering each other on the arm, me winding her up.
“We did it all tentatively and got it over as quick as we could. Then we had to run it again with another couple of folk. Then the technical run-through. It was still all those jangly nerves.”
By the time the show opened and Karen heard the whooping, cheering and weeping from the audience, it wasn’t a big deal any more.
“By show number five I was running backstage, whipping off the clothes and changing into the dressing gown for that scene.”
It features naked women but Calendar Girls is not a racy show. Karen stressed: “It’s not a big exposé, the folk who want to come and see this don’t want to see that.
“This idea that it’s just about a bunch of middle aged women who take their clothes off is wrong. These are actual women who did a phenomenal thing. They wanted to raise enough money to buy a new sofa for the relatives’ room where John, the husband one of the women, was treated for leukaemia.
“They just wanted a sofa, instead what happens is the calendar, the play, the film and now the musical. They have raised over £6m in 20 years.”
Calendar Girls, Kings Theatre Glasgow, June 11-22, www.atgtickets.com .
