It is 2007 and the four women who struck it rich on the horses in Amanda Whittington’s Ladies’ Day (2005) are splashing the cash on a four-week trip to Australia. One of the first people they meet is Charlie, a bongo-playing hippy who landed on Bondi beach in 1968 and has not moved since.
Played by Gareth Cassidy, he is a figure of fun, an old stoner who gets his philosophy from songs by Joni Mitchell. His journey to self-knowledge is as tired as his Nepalese shirt.
For all that, he is a pointer to where Whittington is taking her breezy comedy, first produced in 2007 and now staged by the same team who revived Ladies’ Day at the New Vic last year. After a slow-burning first half (do we need to see the whole flight to understand they have travelled to Australia?), she puts these former fish-filleters into an ancient landscape where the unfamiliarity, the Dreamtime philosophy and the odd puff of cannabis prompts them to reassess their lives back home in Hull.
It is the same trick Shakespeare played in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Willy Russell in Shirley Valentine: characters set in their ways rediscovering their true selves when placed in an alien environment. “Change your thoughts, change the world,” says Aussie traveller Danny (Richard Lund) in a moment of bumper-sticker wisdom.
The shift lets Pearl (Kate Wood) show the vulnerability behind her matriarchal authority: “Out here, I’m dealing with me.” It lets Shelley (Annie Kirkman) get past her designer-label materialism to reconnect with the humble factory worker inside. It lets Jan (Tanya-Loretta Dee) drop her defences and learn to be loved. And it lets Linda (Jo Patmore) reconsider their gender identity in a fabulous sequence at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras that sends the show out with a transformative bang.
The revelations are more pleasing than profound, but the cast invest the play with a sisterly spirit, equal parts abrasiveness and affection, that comes from the heart. Director Marieke Audsley plays it slow and steady, while raising the energy with some lively choreography to reflect the hallucinatory changes in the women’s lives.
At the New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 30 March
