Bunny Christie’s set design consists of huge boards of press-out parts for life-size models of the Ford Cortina produced at the company’s Dagenham plant in the 1960s. It’s unwittingly a fine emblem for a show that presents a big, plastic version of the story of the women sewing machinists’ strike there in 1968, which paved the way for the Equal Pay Act shortly afterwards. Likewise, the second-act opener in which one of the Ford company’s head-office suits arrogantly declares “This Is America” is an unintentionally accurate description of this Yankification of both the 2010 film on which the musical is based and the history itself.
    
This version of the story is all about the individual spirit winning out, an American narrative trope intrinsically opposed to the communitarianism that informed both the principle for which the women struck and much of the support they received from beyond their own ranks. Shop-steward Connie (Isla Blair) is robbed of her screen husband and thus a major humanising factor, then is killed off so that she can’t even fractionally divert the focus from Gemma Arterton’s reluctant figurehead Rita O’Grady. Arterton has commitment, a strong singing voice and an almost serviceable Mockney accent; what she doesn’t have, in Richard Bean’s script, is anything like the understanding portrait of the film version.
    
When Bean is not distorting the plot to make it conform to narrative clichés (a union official turned into a quisling, Rita’s husband leaving her), he’s throwing blunt jokes left, right and centre, but mainly left, and recklessly at the expense of the whole point of the story. Here, famously independent Employment Secretary Barbara Castle cannot appear onstage without the male bolstering of Prime Minister Harold Wilson – a fine comic performance by Mark Hadfield, but an insult by Bean to the historical Wilson, cartooning him as an incompetent, venal clown. There are some fine tunes (with often anthemic music by David Arnold, and Richard “Jerry Springer The Opera” Thomas’s lyrics at their best when they break free of Bean), but the show’s version of human relationships is verging on a travesty, its sexual politics are a travesty, and its political politics are a damned travesty.
     
Written for the Financial Times.