BWW Reviews: THE FLANNELETTES, King's Head Theatre, May 19 2015

Delie has a heart of gold, and an award for picking up litter, so, on her annual summer visit to her Auntie Brenda's (a refuge for abused women) she sets off, bin-bags in hand, on a sponsored clean-up, a fundraiser for the hostel. But, though Delie still has the unselfconscious conversation of a child, she has the feelings of an adult, and she, like the other characters in The Flannelettes (continuing at The King's Head Theatre until 6 June) just wants to be loved. But love, in the cold economic climate of a Yorkshire pit village shorn of its pit a generation ago, is hard to find and, even when you do, it comes with some very hard knocks indeed.

This new play by Richard Cameron is another return to his South Yorkshire roots, to working class life in a nation that seems to reject the term, and the forgotten masses the phrase still describes. Though his script can get dark (very dark in the second half), the human spirit is always evident, if, especially in the character of Roma and her addiction to her thuggish boyfriend, that spirit can misdirect its enthusiasm.

The six actors are with us for over two hours in the tight space at the back of the pub and they're often difficult to look at (Holly Campbell's "bruises" causing audible intakes of breath around me as Roma returned to the refuge after another pounding), so performances need to be strong - and they are. Suzan Sylvester's Brenda is a typical getter of things done, mothering her battered mothers and rejecting the advances of police liaison officer, Jim, an oily unsympathetic character delivered with just the right amount of supercilious curled lip by James Hornsby. How she could ever have been involved with him is perhaps the only stretch of credibility in the play, despite the extremes of behaviour on show.

Best of the lot is Delie, poor Delie, whom we so want to "grow up" to enjoy the pleasures of romantic love, but whom we fear will end up with the kind of boys who exploit her aching desire to belong with trials of loyalty like self-administered tattoos - and worse, much, much worse. Emma Hook is compelling on stage, her energy uncontainable by comfortable jersey tops and bottoms - but her Delie is a real person, no cardboard cutout victim to help make political points. Delie is not above threatening those closest to her with revealing their secrets if she feels like her own relationship with her "boyfriend" is in jeopardy - but even as she lashes out, we can see in her eyes that it's hurting her.

And Delie can sing, really sing, on the karaoke in the Welfare, dressed like her 60s Motown heroines, with Brenda and her friend / part-time chaperone George at her side. She belts out Carole King's One Fine Day (in the style of The Chiffons) which made me think of another sorely abused woman, Butterfly, singing of her plaintive and hopeless dream of life with the bastard Pinkerton, Un Bel Di. But I needn't have looked that far - Gerry Goffin's lyrics were enough to describe Delie's vulnerability to ruthless men, their rein ever freer, their reign of terror ever more terrible as the state retreats from its social obligations.

One fine day, you're gonna want me for your girl.

But he won't, and because women like Delie and Roma are not "his girl" - they're "our girl". We should recognise that and do more - much more - to protect these women and to help them rebuild their communities, shattered a generation ago in an ideological war and no closer to salvation now.

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