Calendar Author Reveals Naked Truths at Q&A

Calendar Girls tells the story of the members of a Yorkshire chapter of the Women’s Institute who, in 1998, decided to pose nude for a charity calendar following the death of one of the group’s husbands from cancer. Lynda Bellingham and Patricia Hodge play Chris and Annie (the parts played on screen by Helen Mirren and Julie Walters) in an ensemble company that also features Sian Phillips, Gaynor Faye, Brigit Forsyth, Julia Hills and Elaine C Smith. The premiere production is directed by The Right Size’s Hamish McColl.

Tim Firth’s other stage credits include the book for the Olivier Award-winning Madness musical Our House and the plays Neville’s Island, The Safari Party, The Flint Street Nativity and The Sign of the Times, currently touring with Stephen Tompkinson. His other screen credits include Kinky Boots, Confessions of a Shopaholic, Cruise of the Gods, Blackball, Once upon a Time in the North and All Quiet on the Western Front.

Following its premiere last September in Chichester and a regional tour, the Calendar Girls started performances on 4 April 2009 at the Noel Coward, where it’s now booking with its current cast through to 25 July.

Last night’s discussion took place in the theatre immediately after the performance and was chaired by Whatsonstage.com editorial director Terri Paddock. For more photos and feedback, visit our Outings Blog and for details of upcoming events, click here. Edited highlights from the Q&A follow …

On the genesis of the screenplay

The idea for the film was the original producer’s, Suzanne Mackie, who had seen the calendar and seen the potential in it. As a writer I spend my life looking for great stories and hoping that they land. This is how stupid I was: Suzanne saw the potential immediately when she first read the Guardian report on the calendar. And I had seen the report and thought, there’s that calendar I bought last year and it’s up in my kitchen now and I’ve been staring at all year and throughout all those opportunities for it to strike me that it was a great idea, I missed it, I missed it every month, I missed it for a year…

I was in the middle of another project when Suzanne approached me and said I’ve got four weeks, do what you can in four weeks. I used to write longhand into a ledger book. I said I’ll have to write straight onto computer. I went to a hotel in London and read the director’s draft of the previous incarnation once. From this I was able (to get into it) … because I had bought the calendar and knew the area and had been on holiday to the village, unwittingly, every year four times a year my entire life and my mum had been in the WI and my gran had been in the WI. There was so much I could do very quickly. I just based the characters on my mum and her friends – not the real women, I didn’t meet the real women until the script was written.

I wrote the first 20 minutes in the first day. It was a great lesson in writing. I got everything planned out, what I thought the locale should be, what I thought the women should be like, how they should talk to each other and then I wrote at speed.

The problem with the script at that stage was there was no third act. The story got to a certain point and then stopped because nothing else had happened. But by that stage, something had happened because the women had split up over the making of the film. So in a way that provided its own third act because the schism between the women I then represented as being between Chris and Annie, a split over this very strange nature of celebrity that is brought by the death of someone and how proud you can be of celebrity if it’s taken the death of someone you love to bring it about. The making of the film provided its own third act.

On the timing of 9/11

The day I started the screenplay happened to be 11 September 2001 … I started working and wrote those first 20 minutes before I turned on the TV at 1.45pm and heard about 9/11. It was a very odd time because I’m quite a home boy. I live in the North-West of England. I write in a room with three goldfish in it and very little light, out in the countryside where I’ve grown up. The idea of writing on a computer, in a hotel room, in London was weird enough and then for it to be over-laid with this …

I think everyone felt the same that day. You started to look into the sky, you didn’t trust planes; you didn’t trust anything, the world felt very fragile. There was a certain weird energy, a slight surreality, which you often get at funerals where people overcompensate for their grief. There’s a heightened sense of energy and joy in a sort of atavistic way of people clinging onto life. That powered me through the next two weeks and so 65-70% of the script was written in two-and-half weeks.

On adapting it for the stage

When you write a film for a company like Disney, all the rights to any stage version are taken away from you. So I thought, I will bide my time. There is no point in doing this until (the film) has been on TV a couple of times and more people have seen it, and even then I knew I might not get the rights because Disney can give them to anyone.

I asked my agent to go to Disney and tell them I was interested in making a stage version of Calendar Girls. And in the Disney office there was a file as thick as a fist of people who had applied to have the stage rights of this to turn it into a musical. That isn’t what I wanted to do, I wanted to do a play and I think that’s what swung it in my favour.

At that stage, my primary aim in doing it was so that, in the future, amateur companies could do it. My actual first thought was, my mum is in an amateur dramatic company, they are crying out for plays because (those groups) are largely populated by women in their 50s and 60s, and to have a play that is not only featuring but completely driven by big character parts for women of that age would be perfect.

On the WI

The best nights (of the show) are the WI nights – actually, the WI matinees. Calendar Girls has got to be the only show where the matinees sell out quickest. Right from the outset … in terms of the play and the film no one at the WI has ever been churlish with me. Because the spirit of what the women did was so positive and because it was inspired by pain and loss, and a loss that many people will feel and have felt, that ended any major objections. I think they have been saluted for the bravery of what they did …

My link to the WI was through my gran. She was a massive serial WI-er. She was one of the WI from her local WI who went to meet the Queen and had the birthday party at Buckingham Palace. And because Gran did it, Mum did it. As Gran got older, she still wanted to go and Mum didn’t, but she went because she felt she ought to. Mum was like the naughty schoolgirl at the back, she’d been made to go but was actually having a really good time. That whole sense of back-row naughty schoolgirl camaraderie, which is key between Chris and Annie, was the source of the comedy in the whole thing …

I’ve talked at a couple of WI meetings and I learned a lot … In the scene where Chris presents an M&S cake, I had mistakenly said a Victoria sponge has cream in it – they nearly killed me. Also, I told them I had written these ideas for speeches at the start, the broccoli speech. They said, we like the rest of the script but we think the broccoli, well, no one will believe that, it’s too stupid. Then there was a pause and one of the other girls said: ”You say that, but last week we did have the speech on the history of the tea towel.”

Tragically, one scene I wrote got cut. I was having a chat with one of the original calendar girls, and at the end of it, this woman came up and said, “I’d just like to say that there has been a terrible oil slick in north Canada and we’ve been asked, could as many of you as possible knit some cardigans for penguins that have been cleaned”. I wrote a whole scene where exactly that happened and this guy (signalling to the cardigan wearing toy penguin a stage hand has brought out on stage to display) had a moment. Cruelly, we realised in Chichester that this was one penguin too far. But he has still come on tour with us.

On nudity on stage

When we started this, people didn’t realise that you weren’t going to be completely naked, that it was more of a fan dance. If you see anything incriminating, it will go like a soufflé with the door open too quickly. It all has to be very tightly put together. But you can tell actors that and they think, well I’m going to be naked on stage. This is ridiculous. But as the girls realised what was going on, it’s gradually got more and more daring, everyone coming further and further forward – no no, you have to keep your clothes on! There’s a great spirit in the room, it is very intoxicating.

In my mind I had legislated the scene of the photoshoot would last about two minutes, but on the first night at Chichester, I suddenly felt the whole theatre move forward in their seats. There was a strange electricity in the room. I realised it was because everybody was simultaneously thinking, god almighty, they’re going to do it. It wasn’t a movie where it’s contained. These girls are really going to do it, for real, here now, in Chichester, in front of me. And that is how the end scene became what it is now: this celebration that goes on for nine minutes and just keeps moving. I think being on stage, rather than on film, makes it closer to what it must have been like in the room the night that they did it. When you applaud the photos, you applaud the bravery of the women here doing it and the women who did it originally.

On the pitfalls of translation

The German translator called me and said, “I have nearly finished translating your play but there is one problem, ‘Jerusalem’. We don’t understand what ‘Jerusalem’ means and it is incomprehensible as an English national anthem. Could I replace it with ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’?“. It’s a good question. What do you do? You have to be very specific about what “Jerusalem” is doing in the play. At the beginning, the women are meant to be singing and they’re not doing it, Cora is the only one who is. By the end, the fakery of having this singing group has made Cora do it for real and she’s come into blossom by doing that. In terms of its purpose in the narrative, it’s part of one of the seeds that marks the blossoming of the women.

What I said to him was it has to be “Jerusalem”, but you should write your own lyrics. And the lyrics have to be about the pastoral beauty of England with a little dash of religion, which makes all the references to it later in the play worth it.

On the original Calendar Girls

The debt we owe to them is colossal. I have a strong relationship with the girls, and I let them know at the end of every week how the show is going and make them feel involved in it. Otherwise, it would have felt like a smash and grab and no one wanted that.

The play continues to raise money. A certain proportion of royalties and also the booking fee from every ticket sold is a donation to Leukaemia Research. The play continually goes forward, generating money for the charity. And they are fundamental to that, that is their ownership as much as ours. And they come and they cry. They come quite often.