THEATRE REVIEW: Ladies' Day - The New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-U-Lyme. Staffordshire.

The one-off move of 2005’s Royal Ascot from its Surrey home to the racecourse at York was a major event for the northern city. Taxi drivers and hoteliers there enjoyed their biggest payday for many a year, and playwright Amanda Whittington imagined four women – colleagues at a fish processing plant on Humberside – swapping their daily drudge for the adventure of a lifetime at the races.

We meet the four at work, sharing gossip and banter as they work towards their daily target of 1,000 crates of prepared and packed fish. Jan (Tanya-Loretta Dee) is a devoted single mum who has spent the past fourteen years bringing up her daughter Claire alone, but is about to lose her to Leicester University. Linda (Jo Patmore) is quiet and shy, and obsessed with the singer Tony Christie. Her direct opposite in personality is the feisty, brash Shelley (Annie Kirkman) whose dream is the celebrity high life which she will achieve by “bagging a millionaire”. Finally there is Pearl (Kate Wood) who, at 55, is soon to leave the plant in order to spend more time with her husband who is about to retire.

The three younger women want to organise a send-off for Pearl, and when she drops into the conversation that her dream is to attend Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot, it’s sorted. Or not: there are a few hurdles (good horse racing pun there!) to get over before they can go. First is getting the day off work and thankfully supervisor Joe (Gareth Cassidy, with Humberside accent) is celebrating some good news of his own and so is happy to get agency cover in for the day. The next, more difficult obstacle in their way, is the fact that tickets sold out months ago. Undaunted, they set out anyway.

The transformation of the stage from a fish packing plant to a racecourse, and of four overalled women into racegoers dressed up to the nines, is one of those remarkable tricks of theatre which make the experience so magical and takes place seamlessly thanks to the clever set and costume design of Jess Curtis and the joyful choreography of Sundeep Saini.

The ladies can’t afford to buy tickets from tout Fred (Cassidy, with Geordie accent) but Linda has a stroke of luck when she finds four tickets. There’s a moral dilemma here – the tickets should have been returned to their rightful owner, but this would have been a short play if that had happened!

Once inside, the ladies have fun drinking champagne, learning the bookies’ tic-tac sign language from TV pundit Jim (Cassidy, with “BBC” accent) and placing a bet on the Tote with potentially life-changing winnings if all six chosen horses win.

They learn about the darker side of the racing world too, meeting Patrick (Cassidy, with unconvincing Liverpool accent) who got carried away following a winning streak and is now penniless, lacking even the means to get a bus home. Separated from the gang and lost, Linda wanders into the jockeys’ changing room where Kevin (Cassidy, with rural Irish accent) tells her how hard a jockey’s life is, practically starving in order to keep to weight whilst working gruelling hours and driving vast distances between race meetings. Shelley sees the sleazy side of the showbiz world when Jim makes a sordid suggestion.

Meanwhile, the alcohol is taking its toll and secrets are starting to emerge. Pearl in particular has a dark secret which turns out to be what motivated her to come to Ladies’ Day. Although done with a light and humorous touch, this is actually quite a deep examination of close female friendship and the effect that sudden revelations can have upon it.

Will the fractures in the friendship prove to be terminal? Does the ladies’ bet come up? How will they all get along when the magical transformation is reversed and they find themselves back in the fish factory? Why not buy a ticket and find out…

Ladies’ Day was set in 2005 and some of the references reflect that – Blair as Prime Minister for instance, not to mention “a tenner for a bottle of wine” – and yet much of it could be contemporary. The divide between the women working all hours in an unsatisfying job but still struggling to make ends meet and the riches of the “Ascot set” is even bigger nowadays.

The play has some absolutely joyful moments and one or two very sad ones. The female characters are believable without crossing the line into stereotypes and we find ourselves rooting for them, despite their faults. The versatile Cassidy gives each of his characters a life of his own, with at least nine costume changes during the play. Under Marieka Audsley’s direction this is a great production and a superb evening's entertainment and made for a memorable first theatre visit of 2023 for me.

An afterthought. Amanda Whittington has written two sequels to Ladies’ Day: Ladies Down Under (2007) and Ladies Unleashed (2022) – I wonder if there are any plans to stage these here at the New Vic?

Reviewer - Ian Simpson
on - 7.2.23