Back The Times - June 14 2010
By Sam Marlowe
It wasn’t until 2000 that the surviving former members of the Women’s Land Army received an official invitation to pay their respects at the Cenotaph. Devised by the Lions part company from letters and interviews with original Land Girls, this lively play colourfully reveals the realities of digging for victory. It’s a predictable mix of the poignant and the humorous; and although the four performers interact, chuckling, wincing or nodding sympathetically at each other’s stories, the narrative is dependent on the dramatically unexciting form of interwoven monologues. Yet it’s impossible not to be awed by the bravery, determination and resolute stamina of the women whose experiences are evoked here.
Peggy is a resourceful Cockney who chooses the WLA over a job in a hospital because she’s squeamish. The well-to-do Poppy is seduced by recruitment posters featuring golden-haired girls with gleaming teeth. The independent-minded Vera is stifled by her conventional upbringing and longs for a more challenging, useful life. And the shy, pretty Geordie Margie falls for the Land Girl uniform and signs up expecting to pick fruit and vegetables in the sunny South. None of them is prepared for the rigours and hardships ahead — and it’s not just a matter of outdoor loos, long hours, meagre rations and backbreaking labour. Their travails are often comical: the difficulty of ploughing a straight furrow when you’re short-sighted, the first encounter with a cow’s udders or a randy bull. But there are also reports of sexual assault and sadistic bullying; one woman recalls being fenced in by farmworkers around a hayrick swarming with rats. And beneath the courage and camaraderie lurks terror, for distant loved ones and for themselves, with doodlebugs falling out of blue skies and a vast landmine crater in a neighbouring meadow.
Sonia Ritter’s production, on Jane Linz Roberts’s barn set, is warm, tender and leisurely. The simplicity of the staging allows space for the eloquence of the women’s testimony, punctuated by wartime skits and songs delivered in sweet close harmony. It’s not ground-breaking; but it’s the hidden history it reveals that impresses and inspires.
