Sweet Ladies
Old Fire Station until Sat. 21st September

"Good night ladies. Good night sweet ladies. Good night. Good night", mutters Hamlet's Ophelia before her descent into madness and an early, watery grave. In the first scene of Nick Thomas' new play, Jerry (a film star) finishes a monologue with the same dark and foreboding lines, this time though, quoting from T.S Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Like Ophelia, he too stands at the threshold of mental meltdown, a pawn in the hand of his superiors.

The use of Ophelia's last words in Eliot's Waste Land, given the context of the previous lines, smothers us in irony - a sublime dramatic joke. Worry not though, the posters for this play are pink for a reason, and it rarely ventures into such territory.

For Hamlet, Denmark was a prison, as is life for the three women Jerry meets at an Oxford college wedding - Louise is an Oxford Don growing disenchanted with the everyday grind and reality of academia. Lily married her college sweetheart straight after graduating and, after seven years of
domestic bliss, is starting to find her life mundane. Mary, the rich It-girl abot town, yearns for some stability in her life. The chance meeting between Jerry and the women sets up a chain of events whereby the "sweet ladies" of the play's title endlessly bicker (they each envy the other two women in the group) before eventually coming to accept their lives.

This lilting comedy of "tears and champagne on a summer afternoon" is handled (with one exception) impeccably by the strong cast. Lucy Blackledge in particular imbues her character with the hard-edged frailty that the role demands. The one exception to the high level of professionalism is the acting performance of Paul Eros (in an admittedly tiny part). In the program notes, he admits that he is "as at home on the stage as is a fish on a bicycle". I agree fully with this sentiment.

Well-acted and occasionally funny, this play is as sweet and unthreatening as the idea of champagne on a summer's afternoon.

Munzar Sharif