Pair of Beauties (Hull)

You need to arrive early for Gordon Steel‘s A Pair of Beauties just to read the list of consumer warnings: strobe lighting, photographic flashes,
pyrotechnic effects, strong language…

Well, the strobe doesn’t happen, the
pyro’s a damp squib, and who needs warning about photo flash? As for strong
language, yes, the letter ‘f’ does crop up more than at the average vicar’s
tea party, but surely it’s outrageous in 2002 to feign shock at language
that has been, however inelegantly, in everyday currency for three or four
decades.

Steel, who also directs, has served his time in education and knows his
milieu and his characters well. Natasha and Martine are emerging adults,
best friends impatient of college and keen to hit the fast track route to
fame. They’re taken up by Connor, a dodgy photographer (played with icy
narcissism by Graham Martin), who promises them stardom but whose project
doesn’t go beyond getting into Natasha’s knickers. The girls are prepared
to commit to hard work, but even they hadn’t reckoned on dragging up as
bananas for a shopping mall promotion. It dawns, as Connor carves another
notch on the bedpost, that this isn’t going anywhere.

And there it is – an unpretentious rites-of-passage play packed with great
one-liners and witty ripostes. But not so simple as it seems because, thankfully, Steel isn’t content to portray Natasha
and Martine just as foul-mouthed, sybaritic airheads. They are damaged souls
who need their escapist dreams.

Natasha, slim and naturally gorgeous, is
into drama, preferring the casting there to real life’s package of parents
who abandoned her and left her in the care of grandparents; and Martine,
plagued by irritable bowel syndrome and compulsive eating, yearns for freedom
from obesity to make it as a model. Between the two in his wheelchair sits
Natasha’s Grandpa, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and haunted by
progressive dementia. In the face of the girls’ lacerating cat-fights, Grandpa becomes
the focus of their fierce loyalty and responsibility, and it is to him that
they return for the final symbolic (sentimental and not entirely wholesome or
credible) purgation.

Newcomers to the professional stage – Danielle Williams and Natalie
Blades – have roles to die for as they head up the cast of this amiable piece,
and they gobble them up with energy and panache, to be greeted with
spontaneous cheers from a younger audience than even Hull Truck can normally
command. As Grandpa, Eddie Caswell is splendidly grumpy in a Victor
Meldrew kind of way but sadly looks as fit as a flea and shows little of the
desperation that characterises encroaching dementia.

A Pair of Beauties speaks with simple truth of, and to, a generation
largely ignored by our theatre: for that reason alone it merits a hearty
welcome.

– Ian Watson (reviewed at the Hull Truck Theatre)