FLOWER GIRLS
Hampstead
Theatre, London NW3
Opened 23 October, 2007
***
From many writers, a play such as this might seem like an
uncharacteristic attempt to play the sentiment card by disabled-led
theatre company Graeae, who normally have no truck with judgements such
as "excellent, considering...". But one of the strengths of Richard
Cameron as a playwright is that he is unashamed of sentiment without
ever tipping into syrupy sentimentality. He is interested in how the
mostly disabled women of the Crippleage in Edgware got on with each
other, the world and themselves, but in exactly the same way that he is
interested in any other group of people he writes about. So, while Joan
(Sophie Partridge) may allow herself to be fleeced by an art teacher in
one strand of the action set in 1965, or Lily (Karina Jones) invent a
fake history of her blindness to make herself more worthy of her young
Royal Navy beloved in 1940, Sally (Sonia Cakebread)'s neurosis about
fire and Rose (Lizzie Smoczkiewicz)'s yearning to belong are largely
unrelated to their physical conditions.
The Crippleage was one of those institutions that combined genuine
philanthropy with the inescapable whiff of the workhouse. Whilst the
women's work of making and selling hand-made flowers was intended to
foster independence, they lived cheek by jowl in plywood cubicles where
curtains gave some protection to modesty but none to privacy; the
concern that led to its foundation did not extend to its design, with
"fourteen stone steps [leading into] a factory with nigh on two 'undred
'andicapped women." Wartime brought its own privations, with the
factory converted to turning out rivets, and resources in such scarcity
that young Alice (Nicola Miles-Wildin) cannot obtain a new leg
calliper, although the new air raid shelter offers a chance of illicit
assignations. And the fact that the two plotlines are set a generation
apart is, of course, significant.
Peter Rowe and Jenny Sealey's production (under the joint auspices of
the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich, and arriving in London at the end of
a short tour) is less formally adventurous than most of Graeae's recent
work that I have seen. (Early this year, their revival of Sarah Kane's Blasted rediscovered the challenge
of that work's vision.) But it serves as a reminder that Issues with a
capital I matter, not as abstract principles, but because they apply to
individual people.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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