As lead characters go, June Buckeridge is an odd one. In the 1965 play by Frank Marcus, she is the leading light of a soft-centred radio soap opera (it is set in Applehurst but it might as well be Ambridge) and is loved by millions in the role of district nurse Sister George.
Behind the homely persona, however, lies a conflicted woman. Boozy, irascible and thin-skinned, she maintains a sado-masochistic relationship with the much younger Alice, who clings to her youth just as certainly as the older woman watches hers slip away. Lest you have any sympathy for her, George, as everyone calls her, inflicts demeaning punishments on her vulnerable companion, the cruelty sitting uncomfortably against the comic tone.
In this Told By An Idiot co-production, Hayley Carmichael plays George with no expectation of being liked. In suede jacket, ankle-length tweed skirt and an ill-judged wig, she snaps, rants and stomps across Lulu Tam’s tape spool of a set. It is all Ada Player’s Alice can do to simper and smile in her baby-doll negligee and flicked-up bob.
Little of the charm with which George has seduced her radio listeners crosses into her life. That makes it hard to know if we should be rooting for her as she risks being axed from the programme, or if we should be condemning her narcissism. The uncertainty makes for uneven comedy, despite the better efforts of director Paul Hunter in a buoyantly acted production.
Putting clear water between this and the 1968 movie, which turned the radio soap into a television series, he turns George’s whole life into an audio drama. Actors Rina Fatania and Patrycja Kujawska take turns behind the Foley desk, giving every bottle poured, glass slurped and door slammed an exaggerated sound effect.
Momentarily funny, it is a joke with limited mileage, even if in the play’s dying moments it allows George to be reduced to a set of missed lines and forgotten cues, an actor without a script. Intriguing though that idea is, it is more weighty than the play merits and, although its easy acceptance of lesbian relationships – dysfunctional or otherwise – is historically fascinating, it remains a hard one to warm to.
• At New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 13 May.
