Review: Real emotion moves the audience at Leamington’s Loft

Love, despair, marriage, birth, death - and plenty of down-to-earth laughter: we experience it all in the unlikely space of an 80s hair salon in Louisiana, USA.

Many readers will remember the 1989 film starring Julia Roberts, but I felt pleased that I had never seen it nor the play, as the plot and animated conversations on stage were completely new to me. And although the action is wholly made up of a small group of women talking to one another in the same setting, there is so much to take in, absorb, identify with and dwell on that I was hooked throughout. Because these women are doing so much more than just talking. Yes, they gossip and tease, but they also confide, console, congratulate, commiserate, sympathise - and they listen.

While the main thread of the story focuses on the bubbly and pretty Shelby - who gets married, ignores doctors’ advice and gets pregnant despite her struggle with diabetes - each of the six women in the play has her own battle to conquer and is supported through it by the others. Playwrite Robert Harling based his script on personal experience relating to his sister - and the real emotion of the things women go through (pregnancy, dealing with difficult husbands and coping with widowhood to name a few) comes through so strongly that it is admirable that a man has been able to get inside the heads of six very different women to this degree.

Loft director Gus McDonald has noted the “bonding process” he witnessed between the actresses in this production. And we see what he means. These women’s feelings come across so naturally that we feel along with them. All six were fantastic but I was particularly moved by Mary MacDonald as M’Lynn and Natasha Scott-Morgan as Shelby.

Sundari Cleal