Grand Canal Theatre

Despite the titillating posters, there were few male audience members at the opening of Calendar Girls, the stage version of the 2003 film, which is based on the real-life experience of a group of Yorkshire women who produced a nude calendar in 1998 to raise funds for cancer research.

Much as the Yorkshire Women's Institute is a single-gender sphere, so Calendar Girlsis very much a show for women, and Tim Firth's script provides a variety of different types of women for the audience to identify with. There is the single mum and the glamorous mum, the woman betrayed by a philandering husband and the widow betrayed by her husband who dies, and so on.

Despite all their physical and social differences the women are united by the common cause of the calendar project. If posing nude liberates them from their fixed social roles, it also liberates them from fixed gender roles; by baring all, they present a challenge to the Women’s Institute idea of the modern woman, as well as to conventional notions of beauty.

If Calendar Girlsis a noble celebration of the ageing woman and her place in society, it is not, however, particularly inspiring theatre. Tim Firth's script is a series of sketches, many of which function merely to set up a single gag.

The characters remain two-dimensional throughout, and the performances by a variety of celebrities and soap-opera stars, does little to flesh out the stereotypes or to lift the energy of the plodding exposition. Roger Haines further encumbers the performers by asking them to needlessly reconfigure the furniture in every scene, and the final resolution of the various conflicts is unbearably sentimental.

However, spontaneous applause of recognition from the audience of mostly older women throughout the performance confirmed that the demographic for Calendar Girlsis a specific one; one that this reviewer does not belong to.

Until February 19th