The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Spark, adapted by Gabriel Quigley

Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh - 17/04/24

An imposing black and white blow-up photo of Blitz-shattered streets of London is the backdrop to where we are: watching Gabriel Quigley’s witty and loving adaptation of Muriel Spark’s ‘Girls of Slender Means’, set in London, 1945. 

The action is prefaced with a brief fast-forward to 1963 (when the novel came out) with central character Jean Wright as a magazine gossip editor wanting to investigate a recently reported “martyrdom” in Haiti. The martyr was a Jesuit priest called Nicolas Farringdon. She had known him back in 1945 when she and her four flatmates resided in Kensington at a hostel for “Ladies of Slender Means under the Age of Thirty” and he was still a louche atheist-anarchist.

The narrative takes up shortly after VE Day, back in the hostel. Spark’s novel is a slender volume itself, but still involves a large cast of hostel residents. Quigley confines her attention to the top floor, peopling it with five well brought up girls, away from home to dabble in the world of work. They are unashamed of their descent into slender means because “in 1945, all the nice people in England were poor”. They need to be physically slender as well, if they want to slip through the tiny bathroom window to access the roof-top; out of bounds, but a fine sun-bathing spot by day, an assignation nest by night and a potential escape route to adventure.  Not an easy squeeze through for some, who feverishly count calories and rail against the pounds gained with the stodgy wartime diet. 

The girls are rubbing along pretty well. Behind the “just get on with it” wartime bravado, each nurses a personal wound, and is sensitive to those of her friends.

Jo is a genuinely pure and selfless soul. Wounded in love, she has immersed herself in poetry, reciting John Donne at length to anyone who will listen. A well-spoken daughter of the clergy, she supplements her wages by giving elocution lessons. Molly McGrath’s performance highlights Jo’s intriguing fusion of self-effacing shyness with moral self-assurance.

Jo also sews, including recycling something into a stunning blue dress. Lurking around are dressmaker’s dummies on wheels, which director Roxana Silbert puts to delightful use as partners for the girls in a night-club scene. 

Selina, the tallest, slimmest and shallowest, is also shockingly selfish. Actor Julia Brown conveys this expertly, as if Selina knows she should really be a Queen Bee and is perplexed that the others treat her just like anyone else. She seizes her moment by seizing the newly finished blue dress.

Anne, in slacks, with her hair wound up in a scarf, is a no-nonsense fiercely independent young woman. She is the unlikely guardian of a shocking-pink Schiaparelli ball-gown which the others tussle to get turns wearing.  Amy Kennedy brilliantly captures the cadences of an era and a class. Her movement and body language excel.

Pauline passes herself off as a flighty young thing, obsessed with dolling up, preferably in the Schiaparelli, to step out with her film star beau. This is later revealed as fantasy. The shadows crossing Shannon Watson’s face poignantly portray a soul gone horribly awry.

The character most clearly linked to Muriel Spark herself is Jean ‘Scotty’ Wright, whom we met as the gossip columnist in the opening 1963 scene.  Molly Vevers as Jean gives a nuanced, intelligent performance exploring the layers of this engaging character. Jean is less flibberty-jibbit, more wise-woman, and might even have been described in those days as a “blue-stocking”. Still, she is more than open to flirtation or a bit of skulduggery. Her boss asks her to befriend a rising young poet and ensnare him in some dodgy deal. This is where the priest-to-be walks into their lives in the form of atheist-anarchist poseur Nicolas Farringdon.  

Nicolas sees himself as all things to all women. He even has somewhere in him the makings of a chaste Catholic priest. Seamus Dillane makes all this ambivalence credible.

I found this stage adaptation authentic and joyful. But one thing was oddly missing. The story featured a world of under-twenty-three-year-olds. It needed some age on stage (Spark’s hostel, incidentally, housed one or two minor old characters).  Not necessarily in a major role. A landlady, a cleaner, an old witch dossing in a corner, would serve as ‘Memento Mori’.