REVIEW: Idle Women at Bridge House Theatre 15 – 19 October 2024

´Charming songs but too long` ★★★

This show is like an almond fondant in an old-fashioned box of chocolates. It’s very sweet but there’s crisp kernel at the centre of it.

During World War Two, women were hired and trained to take barges, laden with coal or other products through the canals of England because the regular bargemen were conscripted. We hear a lot about land girls but much less about these “barge girls” and it’s a story which deserves to be told.

´Idle Women` is a collaborative venture by members of Busy Lizzies Theatre Company who wrote, composed, directed, produced, designed and choregraphed it. It’s effectively, therefore, a devised piece in which four women are on a coal barge. Edna (Emma Barnes) is in charge assisted by Ginny (Elizabeth Kroon). They are joined by two raw recruits, Meg (Maple Preston-Ellis) and Ruth (Catriona Judt) who, it fairly soon emerges, are a gay couple.

Most of the first half is spent exploring the dynamic between the four of them with some delightful folksy songs accompanied by two guitarists, who also play other instruments, along with a rather charming, muted trumpet which connotes nostalgia. Judt singing a lilting 3|4 quasi-music hall song “We Stroll Through the City” and then bursting into a gravelly jazz number is theatrically effective, for example.

In the second half trumpeter Aaron Coomer (good) morphs into a German soldier, the sole survivor of a shot down aircraft. Injured, he takes refuge on the barge and suddenly the plot feels like Robert Westall’s `The Machine Gunners`. Predictably, all four women are initially terrified but eventually the five of them become friends with clear but supressed “feelings” developing between Alfred and Edna, although she has to hand him over to the authorities as soon as she can.

We are dealing, obviously, with serious issues here. Gay relationships between women are not illegal (they never were) but definitely taboo in the 1940s. Alfred is “the enemy” but they learn that they have more in common with him than they would ever have expected to. Edna has a very “well bred” husband and three evacuated sons but, beneath her patrician (matrician?) authoritative manner is a yearning, vulnerable, lonely, unfulfilled woman valiantly doing her duty. So, we’re made to think about split loyalties, and understandable fears especially as Ruth is Jewish, Thus we crunch on the almond at the heart of the piece.

It’s all quite enjoyable and nicely done but there are issues with this show. Some of the dialogue is spoken too fast and not audible, even in a tiny space such as Bridge House Theatre. And the singing is dramatic (clever, neat words) but not always particularly musical although Barnes is an excellent singer. The harmony is pleasing, however, and as an ensemble they often sound a bit like the folk group, The Watersons.

However, `Idle Women` is far too long at 150 minutes including a short interval. It feels like a show which wants to be a single act piece at 60-80 minutes, and I suspect that’s what it has been at some stage in its development. The second act seems very drawn out. There is no need, for instance, to revisit the status of the gay relationship or read out everybody’s letters from home in song after the despatch of Alfred. It feels like a clumsy bolt on and destroys the narrative shape.

Box office https://thebridgehousetheatre.co.uk/shows/idle-women/

Susan Elkin has been reviewing theatre for over thirty years.