Fourteen Again at the Victoria Wood Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere – review

What a pleasure it is to spend an evening with Victoria Wood, at a theatre named in her honour, tucked away in the lakeside town of Bowness-on-Windermere.

Ever since the comedian and writer’s death ten years ago, at the tragically young age of 62, there has been a hole where her wit and wisdom, her humanity and her sharp satirical eye used to be. This was a place she loved; she was friends with the theatre’s owners Roger Glossop and Charlotte Scott, who fund its cultural activities from the Beatrix Potter Attraction on the same site.

Fourteen Again, a musical conjured from a selection of her songs, is an enterprise built on love and friendship – the musical director Nigel Lilley, choreographer Sammy Murray and magnificent stars Sally Ann Triplett and Ria Jones all had long associations with Wood. But it is also something more: a smartly funny evocation of female friendship and endurance that is heart-raisingly hard to resist.

Tom MacRae, who wrote Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, has provided a really clever book that centres on Peggy (Triplett) and Lou (Jones), once the best of friends, who haven’t seen each other since they were 15, until they meet again after 35 years at a meeting of Slim World (a very Victoria Wood-esque setting). Both are unhappy: Peggy is recovering from a divorce from dim and disappointing Duncan, whom she fell in love with at school, and Lou has some hidden sadness in her past.

They play their “game” – imagining an ordinary life – which enables them to sing “Reincarnation”, a song full of canny observations about how women order their existence, and then part. But as Peggy goes to bed, she sings “Fourteen Again” and – in a lightning flash – when she wakes up, she is a 50-year-old in a teenage body (“I love my knees”), ready to right the wrongs of her past and make life turn out differently.

Like When Peggy Sue Got Married or Back to the Future, there is a preposterous element to this notion, but MacRae’s script is supple and funny, both playing with the idea of Peggy’s foreknowledge (looking at her teenage posters, she remarks “if I’d known then that half of them were gay and two were Scientologists…”) and yet allowing the story to strengthen and deepen, as he incorporates one of Wood’s most perfect yet melancholy songs “Litter Bin”, about an abandoned baby.

The writing both acknowledges Wood’s qualities of raw observation – “I’d forgotten what it’s like to wake up bored” – and adds his own sure control of humour and structure. The whole delicate conceit is beautifully embodied by Triplett and Jones (and by Michael Chance doubling the role of hopeless Duncan and playing the piano onstage). All are entirely convincing as excitable teenagers, full of hormones and hope, yet allowing the foreshadowing of fear about what their adult lives will hold.

Triplett and Jones (who hilariously plays all the female parts) have a particular rapport; you believe in their friendship and in their affection for one another. By the time they pull on tap shoes in a final celebratory rendition of “The Ballad of Barry and Freda”, where Barry’s longing to read his catalogue on vinyl flooring conflicts with Freda’s desperate entreaties that he “bend me over backwards on my hostess trolley”, their sentimental journey to happiness has become entirely captivating.

The show is intelligently directed by Jonathan O’Boyle, with just the right amount of audience involvement – Triplett serenades us with a hairbrush microphone in “I’ve Had It Up to Here”, expressing her disillusion with men, and Jones leads a biting version of “Northerners”, a sardonically hysterical send-up of Northern tropes. Glossop provides barebones but effective designs, enlivened by Tim Reid’s black and white video projections that place each scene.

All provide a perfect frame for Wood herself, the star of the show. Her topical references may have been overtaken by time (the programme provides a glossary), but the power of her observation and the depth of her sympathy are eternal. Fourteen Again is a wonderful way to bring them back to life.