It’s chocks away for a very moving play

REVIEW: Spitfire Girls – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, May 20 to Saturday, May 24).

Showtime! stars rating: *  *  *  *

THE enduring legend of the Spitfire is an integral part of our national mythology and rightly so.

If the Hurricane was the workhorse of the 1940 Battle of Britain, then the ‘Spit’ was most certainly the thoroughbred, a sleek and gracious creature sensitive to the pilot’s touch… and relentlessly deadly when angered.

This being the case, I can’t have been the only small boy in the audience on the first night of this moving play yearning for a glimpse of the beloved beast.

But not a flash of skirt, Browning machine gun, wingtip, and hardly a blast from that Merlin engine roaring defiance in the face of Goering’s air armadas was ours to savour.

True, those heroines of the wartime years risked their lives delivering all types of planes to airfields across Britain, not just Spitfires. But the clue is nevertheless in the play’s title, and therefore one’s expectation is understandably heightened.

I fully appreciate that this was a story about people rather than machines, but there will be members of the audience, born long after the Second World War, who might well wonder what the fuss was about. What did a Spitfire look like?

All the same, the story of the largely unsung other ‘Few’ of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) is still a gripping tale of courage and sacrifice, and Tilted Wig Productions and writer Katherine Senior are to be congratulated for creating this moving piece of theatre.

Ms Senior has clearly done an enormous amount of research into the history of these remarkable women, and it is through her tireless efforts that we gain an insight into the lives of quite ordinary young people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

Ms Senior also plays the part of Bett, who with her sister Dotty (Laura Matthews) join up together, despite the determined opposition of their father (Jack Hulland) who would much prefer the girls to be working on the family farm. Despite all his efforts, he is destined to be seriously disappointed.

So. The sisters receive their basic instructions on Tiger Moth trainers and are then immediately thrown into the deep end, or rather in their case, the great Blue Yonder.

Love soon beckons in the form of a young airman (Samuel Tracy) and the couple snatch some precious moments together before duty – and all its perilous uncertainties – comes calling once more.

In the same way that I waited for the familiar outline of the Spitfire to hove into view, I also started to anticipate the inevitable male opposition and predictable outbursts of misogyny, which one feels would have been prevalent in those times. Yet they were strangely absent.

To my surprise, we learn that the only real resentment appeared to emanate from other women, who obviously agree with their male counterparts that a woman’s work, while admittedly never done, certainly doesn’t include flying warplanes up and down the country.

The production features a lot of period music, Glenn Miller getting the usual star billing. At times though, I found the volume levels interfering with the dialogue, which arguably detracted from the more poignant and very human exchanges during the women’s snatched off-duty moments.

This was an intensely emotional play and is thoroughly recommended. That said, on returning from Malvern, this reviewer - with a mental age of 12 - had to content himself with gazing at the Airfix model hanging on a piece of cotton thread from his bedroom ceiling, having been denied sightings of the real thing a few hours earlier.

But that’s my only complaint about a company whose talented actors have seamlessly recreated a crucial period of relatively recent history.