Blonde Bombshells of 1943 – Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough

Writer: Alan Plater

Director: Zoe Waterman

In Paul Allen’s shrewd profile of Alan Plater in the programme, he notes that the playwright liked a description of him as “a gritty northern surrealist” – and that is very much true of Blonde Bombshells of 1943. The background, even to the unexploded bomb that buries itself in the stage during the intermission, is as realistic as you like, but we’re lurching happily into the world of fantasy with the story-line.

The all-female orchestra, the Blonde Bombshells, are rehearsing on the day of a broadcast from a Northern seaside town (readily identified as “‘Ull”, a noted Plater location). They are down to four in number, a tour of G.I. camps having reduced the ranks. Auditions follow. Liz, an impossibly innocent schoolgirl, proves a whiz on clarinet and instantly picks up saxophone. Lily, a nun sent by Mother Superior to boost the war effort, has been taught two songs by her aunt in Bradford one of which is George Formby’s In My Little Snapshot Album– rude? Surely not. Then Miranda represents the upper classes and the Army, with a knack of getting the best out of instruments without knowing a trumpet from a saxophone. Finally Patrick is a man – as someone else once remarked, “Nobody’s perfect.” He certainly isn’t, the dance hall king of Batley and one step ahead of the recruiting sergeant.

If you believe that this motley crew can summon up the wit and polish to put on a stunning 30-minute show at the end of the evening, your suspension of disbelief must be more than willing, but it really doesn’t matter. Plater knits the whole thing together with typical warm-hearted wit, mixing caustic asides with judiciously planted old gags and. every few minutes, another heavily nostalgic song to break up the action. The serious message is understated, but there in the sufferings of two band members whose husbands are dead/imprisoned in a Prisoner-of-war camp and in the pressure on Patrick to do his duty.

Alan Plater’s love of jazz was well known – he once confessed to trying to work a scene with a jazz band into all his television dramas -, but in this case it’s a whole era of variety he recalls. References to the likes of Jewel and Warriss, Max Miller and Nat Gonella pepper the text and the other song Lily knows is a long forgotten gem, I Lift up My Finger. Plater brings in jazz classics like Tuxedo Junction, but it’s the popular songs of the time (many of them recorded by jazzers, of course) that prove most memorable: Body and Soul, Until the Real Thing Comes Along, and a delicious Where or When.

The Blonde Bombshells has undergone plenty of changes over the years. Initially a television play, Last of the Blonde Bombshells, looking back to 1943 over 50 years later, it re-surfaced at Leeds Playhouse some 20 years ago as Blonde Bombshells of 1943, with two of the older characters framing the 1943 story, before evolving into its present form. Now young Elizabeth, in the present, tells us of the lullaby her grandma used to sing, the now sadly neglected Maxine Sullivan song, If I Had a Ribbon Bow. The same song provides the climax to the show as sung, beautifully, by Lauren Chinery as Liz, Elizabeth’s grandma.

Some of the dialogue (notably from Georgina Field’s dominating bandleader, Betty) tends to get obscured by over-amplification, but that’s a minor quibble about an evening where you don’t know who to praise first: the eight actors whose musical skill constantly amazes, Zoe Waterman whose direction gives it the necessary zing, musical director and orchestrator Greg Last and Howard Gray who cooked up such smart arrangements, or Sundeep Saini whose choreography animates the final scene. Or Alan Plater, sadly missed.

Runs until 26th August 2023