REVIEW: Steel Magnolias, People's Theatre, Newcastle
Emotional highs and lows in a Louisiana salon
The American Deep South is encamped this week in the English North East and it’s looking mighty fine even if the accents take a little adjusting to. (It would be the same in reverse, no doubt.)
Attune your ears to the drawwwling delivery and you’ll catch most of what’s said on stage as the cast channel their finest Dolly Parton (the speaking rather than the singing version).
Dolly played hairdresser and beautician Truvy Jones in the hit 1989 film in which she was just one star in a twinkling Hollywood firmament.
In the form of the versatile and ever reliable Emma Jane Robson, the People’s has its own Dolly as Truvy, complete with extravagant blonde topping of hair and relentless cheeriness.
There’s no such thing as natural beauty, she advises salon new recruit Annelle (Ashton Matthews). If people thought otherwise, where would business be?
It’s always a risk putting famous films on stage but Steel Magnolias actually began as this play, written like lightning by Robert Harling as a homage to his younger sister who…
Rhetorical question: just how many spoiler alerts should you give when writing about something this well-known?
Well, not everyone has seen it. “I thought it was supposed to be a comedy,” a young man in the audience was heard murmuring ruefully after Tuesday’s final bow.
It is very funny. Harling, who also wrote the screenplay, poured everything and everyone he knew from his Louisiana upbringing into creating some rich and wonderful characters.
They’re faithfully represented here, even if the other actresses don’t quite have the doppelganger qualities of Emma as Dolly as Turvy.
And it is all women, of course.
The men are sketchily portrayed in absentia as the nerve-shredding losers they almost certainly are. None of them is present to attempt a contradictory word in edgeways and even Drum, wrecking the peace offstage with his bird-scaring antics, is finally silenced when wife M’Lynn (Anna Dobson) hides his gun in her handbag.
All of the action – well, gossiping more like - takes place in the salon where women gather to be spruced up by Truvy and Annelle.
There’s Clairee (Moira Valentine), spirited widow of a municipal big cheese, and then there’s grouchy dog-loving Ouiser (Alison Carr) whose glass is always half empty.
And finally, and most importantly, there’s Shelby, M’Lynn’s daughter (played, in a neat touch which is fully justified, by Minnie Dobson, Anna’s daughter).
The play begins with Shelby’s big day. She’s to be married to a bloke called Jackson who sounds a perfect addition to the town’s evident contingent of knuckle-dragging halfwit husbands.
So she’s happy enough, here in the salon as Truvy goes about her business of supplying what nature, by her reckoning, has failed to supply.
But what begins on a high ends on a low, nuptial joy replaced by grief and bereavement. The surviving women, sisters under the skin, turn to each other for support, a female buttress against the injustices of the world.
That’s the positive to take away. But fine production though this is (take a suitably unseen bow, Mark Burden, director), the plot follows a downward trajectory.
“That strain again! It had a dying fall,” says Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Not something Truvy would ever say but it chimes with what I think that young man meant. It’s comedy… but with a sad sting in the tail.
Steel Magnolias is on until Saturday, June 14. Tickets from the People’s Theatre website.