Champagne socialites set world to wrong

REVIEW: The Party Girls – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, September 16 to Saturday, September 20 with Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday matinees).

Showtime! stars rating: * * * *

FIRST of all, I should mention an enduring urban myth that concerns my hometown of Rugby.

The Second World War breaks out, and Hitler’s lover Unity Mitford has survived a suicide attempt that renders her silly head even sillier because of a bullet that cannot be extracted from what passes as her brain.

Thanks to family connections, she is granted sanctuary in the village vicarage of Hillmorton, which these days is little more than a suburb of Rugby. Clearly, she should have been interned or shot for treason, but the old ‘one rule for us and another for them’ logic seems to have prevailed.

And the myth itself? The presence of Mitford is given as the reason why the Luftwaffe, under direct orders from Hitler, didn’t bomb prime target Rugby, then a centre of heavy engineering.

Meanwhile, Coventry – a mere 12 miles distant – is pounded to dust and ashes during the infamous 500-bomber raid of November 1940.

Anyway, more about that later. Now we must deal with Amy Rosenthal’s brilliant play, a revealing, if imagined, fly-on-the-wall study of aristocratic wasters, literally fiddling while Europe - rather than Rome - is about to burn.

Diana Mitford is married to British fascist leader Oswald Mosely, while hyper airhead Unity goes one better, copping off with Der Fuhrer.

Diana (Elizabeth Dermot Walsh) is super-cool 1930s chic, in stark contrast to Unity (Ell Potter) whose shrill, glass-shattering voice has done my head in within minutes of exposure.

On the other side of the ideological barbed wire, we find Jessica ‘Decca’ Mitford (Emma Noakes) who has declared for communism.

Meanwhile, acting as sisterly referee is successful author Nancy (Kirsty Besterman), whose sole family duty seems to be separating the warring, under-employed siblings, who in truth have nothing better to do but study their navels.

You won’t find a Jarrow marcher or crippled, unemployed Great War veteran in this lot. But you will observe endless pontificating over the caviar and fine champagne, startlingly reminiscent of today’s virtue-signalling middle classes who, of course, have now aped their betters down to the last outraged expression and utterance.

And in charge of aimlessly flouncing, we have Debo Mitford (Flora Spencer-Longhurst), who will be the only member of this gaggle of gels who will end up swapping one stately pile with countless flunkeys for another stately pile with countless flunkeys. Probably the best career move of them all, Debo baby.

War arrives, and Jessica patriotically bunks off to the States, where she is romanced by the emotionally tragic Bob Treuhaft (Joe Coen) a man equally adept at the ukelele as he is spouting the old bovine bottom products.

This fast-moving play is superbly presented by a talented cast, maintaining the endlessly, shrieked, bird-like squashed vowel intonations of the idle upper classes with a rare and finely honed energy.

That said, I couldn’t quite get in this zone of limitless idleness, posturing and privilege. Yes, Richard Beecham’s direction is as taut as a Mitford corset, but Adrienne Quartly’s electronic incidental music brought me slap-bang back to the present day with recurring jolts.

A few period dance band tracks would have prevented this happening. What would have been wrong with that?

Nevertheless, Amy Rosenthal makes some telling points, particularly regarding the callous indifference of the fascist sisters to the plight of the Jews in 1930s Germany, which tellingly echoes the motivations of the current, flag-waving, far left antisemite rabble we witness every weekend on the streets of London and other major cities.

But for daffy duck Unity, the pinning of poster pictures of lover-boy Hitler and fascist slogans on her bedroom wall seems to mirror a later far less obnoxious flippancy, when the obsession might have been the totally harmless Spice Girls. Born before her time, clearly.

Ah yes, and finally, to return to that Rugby urban myth. Unity did indeed stay at that vicarage, and no doubt – like her neighbours – must have heard the noise and seen the glow of nearby Coventry as it burned on that dreadful night.

But Hitler’s compassion for his former Meine Kleine was perhaps almost certainly not the reason why Rugby was spared destruction.

Because in the event of the Panzers having successfully crossed The Channel, the dictator would have needed the town’s extensive rail links in order to allow the Wehrmacht to spread out over the country.

For even the ego-consumed Mitfords were ultimately not all that important when it came to the far more pressing matter of deciding who was to receive that familiar Blitzkrieg treatment…