2007: Bad Girls

A prison full of women? The possibilities of making something musical out of it had already been exploited in Prisoner Cell Block H. At least that show proved that having the stage crammed with women didn't make a feminist musical. I'm not sure if that claim would be made by the creators of Bad Girls: The Musical (Garrick Theatre, 16 August 2007; 86). Firstly, it was an adaptation based on a long-running television series, created by Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus, who had also written for Footballer's Wives and Waterloo Road; Kate Gotts wrote its incidental music. The encouraging news was that Chadwick and McManus wrote the book for the musical, and Gotts the music, a follow-through that encouraged expectation. Still, this was a musical made up from television, and musicals from television were seldom good news: think Acorn Antiques (not even fully qualified to call itself a musical), Budgie and – as big a disaster as any – I Can't Sing.

Gotts saw Bad Girls as ‘an indictment of our penal system’, insisting that the musical was ‘not a piss take. It is serious and it is funny. You go on a real voyage of emotions.’ The prison was the all-female HMP Larkhall, whose officers included warder Jim Fenner (David Burt) and Sylvia ‘Bodybag’ Hollamby (Helen Fraser, repeating her television role). A lesbian romance between the newly appointed wing governor Helen Stewart and long-term prisoner Nikki Wade ran alongside the sleazy behaviour of screw (in more sense than one) Fenner.

The notices were mixed. Susannah Clapp in the Observer heard ‘unflaggingly vivacious music and lyrics’; Nicholas de Jongh heard ‘not very tuneful songs’, although the dialogue ‘crackles and snaps convincingly with lush vulgarity, innuendo and violence’. Under the headline ‘Bad's the Word’, Tim Walker in the Daily Telegraph denounced ‘a profoundly immoral piece of work’, accusing the writers of having created ‘a rotten and hideous thing. The show might well come to be seen as the apogee of yob culture’, although one would have thought several other apogees of that manifestation had happened long before.