It’s no small challenge to take on roles that have been made famous by the likes of Dames Judy Dench and Maggie Smith, but it’s testament to some wonderful acting by the leads, Hayley Mills and Belinda Lang, who play the Widdington sisters, the ladies in lavender of the title, that not for a moment did I fall into the easy trap of making comparisons. They, and the rest of the small but outstanding cast, give great performances in this poignant, tragic, heart warming and, at times, genuinely laugh-out-loud-funny play.  

 

Accepting the play on its own terms, learning about and wanting to know more of the past lives and future hopes of the characters, and being captivated by the story is made easy thanks to Shaun McKenna’s careful and respectful adaptation of the much loved 2004 film, written and directed by Charles Dance. In the move from screen to stage, McKenna has not attempted to merely recreate the scenes, but has honed the story, referenced parts of the narrative rather than showing them and cut out many of the minor characters, to allow more time and room for the principles to develop. In this way, he not only overcomes some of the very real physical restrictions presented by a single set and how that limited stage space is occupied by the cast, but as an audience, we are not asked to make too many leaps of the imagination into different environments and times. 

 

The little world of the house and garden and the beach onto which Ursula and Janet have fondly gazed over decades of living in the same spot, become our familiar world too. There are hints to the busy village life beyond, which they are certainly not divorced from, and even to the unknown realms of London, and other foreign places, but the audience isn’t taken far beyond the confines of their cliff top home. I found myself quite glad not to have been invited. In the closing scene, we laugh gently at Janet’s comment that London is ‘too big for us’, but having been so immersed in the sister’s microcosm existence throughout the play, I felt some sense of compassion for, rather than a wish to mock her sentiment. 

 

The world we look in on is delightfully described with a set that is a little wonder in itself. It’s no mean feat to believably bring a garden, living room, hallway, bedroom, beach and craggy cliff face, and in the final moments, a concert hall, onto one smallish stage at one time, but somehow, such a feat is cleverly and charmingly achieved. 

 

The fullness and almost cluttered nature of the set, contrasts with the sense of the voids created by absent and lost family and friends and the lonely emptiness of spaces that were never filled with hopelessly wished for, but nonexistent lovers. It is partly because Ursula and Janet’s lives are so sparsely populated that the arrival of the young Polish musician, washed up like the most unusual of flotsam on their beach, is all the more impactful on their otherwise uneventful lives. But the real drama of this otherwise gently played story is created by the feelings he evokes in Ursula, for so long without a sense of what it is to love and be loved. Like the sea that sent him to the sisters, the true crushing power of the emotional waves his arrival creates has a force and impact that lies beneath the glittering and beautiful surface.