Writer: Katherine Senior
Director: Sean Aydon
At its best, theatre takes flight. And Spitfire Girls, a new play that wraps up its debut tour in Darlington this week, achieves lift off with its neat choreography. Creating the illusion of a fighter plane ascending into the blue is tricky, especially with little more than folding chairs to assist.
Yet, from limited resources, director Sean Aydon and choreographer Stephen Moynihan make it work. There’s robotic precision as our pilots prepare for take-off, then weightlessness as the cast lifts Dotty (Laura Matthews) into the skies.
While that scene is one of the most memorable in Katherine Senior’s newly-written script, this is more than a display of stagecraft. Eighty years on from VE Day, Spitfire Girls takes a different look at the legacy of the war.
It’s part history lesson, exploring the fascinating, little-known story of the women recruited into the Air Transport Auxiliary to deliver aircraft to military bases. There’s a touch of social commentary, reflecting on how attitudes to women in the workplace, and especially a traditionally “male” workplace, have changed (or not) in the 20th century. If that sounds a bit dry, there’s the emotional punch of shattered relationships to keep things dramatic.
Senior, who also plays Bess, one of the two sisters at the heart of the play, acknowledges in the programme notes that it was the anecdotes and journals of the ATA Girls that really fired her imagination. “I am a storyteller, and I believe we need to tell stories with a beating heart at the centre of it,” she wrote. “Our job is to zoom in on the humanity behind the history, otherwise we may as well watch a documentary.”
That’s why the script is studded with references to real-life incidents: the pilot who landed a Wellington bomber to be greeted with incredulity that there was no “cock” (ahem!) in the cockpit; the disgruntled women shopping for groceries adamant that the ATA Girls were troublemakers; the angry editorials insisting that this was no role for a lady. Eight decades later, too much of this feels all too recognizable – just skim the online comments about women’s football, and the same tired arguments get a dreary contemporary airing.
It’s very much to Tilted Wig’s credit that its production is never hectoring. While Bett and Dotty’s father (played by Jack Hulland) represents bygone attitudes about women’s roles, he comes with a backstory that renders him more than an unsympathetic stereotype. His clash with his daughters’ Commanding Officer (Kirsty Cox) is well-observed, another of those flashes of humanity against wider historical backdrop. Dotty’s suitor Tom (Samuel Tracy) neatly embodies the glitz and glamour of a fighter pilot, without losing our affections when he casually chats about “real” flyers. Meanwhile Senior and Matthews imbue the sisters with a sense of giddy adventure that sweeps the audience along with the story even as we suspect an Icarian fall from grace is inevitable.
And that fall, when it comes, offers a timely reminder that, for many, VE Day was not the kind of happy ending we tend to commemorate today. We witness the war from the relatively recent perspective of New Year’s Eve 1959, when the whole thing was very much within living memory. And we see people who find that keeping calm and carrying on can only go so far. By the end of the evening, we’re left to contemplate how the war continued to haunt those it touched for decades after the guns fell silent.
Runs until 31st May 2025
