Manuel Harlan Photos
The cast.
When the lights come up on the U.S. premiere of Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, on at the Yale Repertory Theatre through June 25 as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, it’s not exactly clear when the play’s promised raucousness is going to kick in.
Hands clasp. Starched skirts are straightened one final time. Ironed blouses glow bone-white from the stage. The first notes of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Lift Thine Eyes,” sung in seamless harmony, float out across the audience. A pin could drop in the pregnant silence between verses.
Then wayward schoolgirl Chell (Caroline Deyga) steps back and unleashes a succinct and satisfying stream of expletives, her five classmates growing animated as she speaks. They know what members of the audience will soon discover: She has uttered the magic words from which the meat of the play will spring, setting Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour in motion.
The cast.
Adapted from Alan Warner’s 1998 novel The Sopranos by the National Theatre of Scotland and Live Theatre, Newcastle, Lee Hall’s Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour tells the story of six not-quite-friends from a fictitious port city in Scotland, each of them trying to navigate the mystifying and pollution-riddled waters of adulthood. When we catch up with them, they are on their way to Edinburgh for a national choir competition, priming their vocal chords with copious amounts of boozy contraband they’ve brought along. That doesn’t end when they arrive in the city, performing a sort of striptease to Handel’s “My Heart Is Inditing” before hitting the town in their decidedly not-Catholic street clothes. What follows is a foul-mouthed, liquor-laced, hesitantly sexual and decidedly feminist day of debauchery, intrigue, and revelation that raises more questions about growing up than it answers.
From its outset to its end, Our Ladies and its tenacious cast delight in their refusal to compromise. Whether they are banding together or tearing each other apart — both happen in a fraught and witty two hours — the play’s leading ladies (Deyga as Chell, Karen Fishwick as Kay, Joanne McGuinness as Orla, Kirsty MacLaren as Manda, Frances Mayli McCann as Kylah and Dawn Sievewright as Fionnula) are unapologetically themselves. They have bodies and are learning when and how to use them, voices that revel in but transcend song, agile minds that wrap around new concepts several times an hour, only to catch on the subject of sex or tequila in a totally relatable and age-appropriate way.
The cast.
In this way, Our Ladies is a coming-of-age comedy that offers a feminist and acutely class-conscious take on that old theme of figuring it all out. Hall’s execution — complete with 13 canonical, male-composed songs rearranged for female voice — turns Our Ladies into neither play nor musical, but a sort of gritty nightly gig. During its course, each character is discovering something about herself and the group around her, and there’s the sense that the world will never be quite the same at the end of the play.
That’s not to say that members of the cast teach any hard and fast life lessons by the end. Instead, they remind us of something that might be even more important: Memento mori. YOLO, if you prefer. There’s always something to be lost and something to be gained. Sometimes it’s okay to not know where you’re going. And sometimes, it’s best not to apologize, and not to explain.
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour runs nightly at the Yale Repertory Theatre through Saturday June 25. For ticket information, click here.
