THESE SHINING LIVES Park Theatre

A brand new 2.5 million theatre has just opened in North London which is good news. The Park Theatre, unsubsidized, has two auditoriums. One has a thrust stage, seats 200 and looks like a smaller Donmar. The other is a flexible 90 seat space and looks like Trafalgar Studio 2 but with a much higher ceiling. The theatre, which includes a large café-bar, is only a one minute walk from Finsbury Park station.
Artistic director Jez Bond promises a mixture of classic and new plays and opens with an American play by Melanie Marnich which tells a true and scandalous story about the exploitation of women in the workplace in Chicago during the 1920s. The Radium Dial Company employed 70 women as painters in the manufacturing of luminous dials for watches. The women were well paid; but the firm did not tell them about the dangers of the work. They had to use their tongues to make the point on the paint brushes which were dipped in radium. When they became ill doctors advised them to take aspirin. When they became terminally sick the firm fired them. The women went to court. They did not get justice until 1938. The script feels as if is still at the workshop stage. The subject matter really deserves a full-scale television docudrama approach. In its present format, a college campus is probably the ideal venue for it. Charity Wakefield is a luminous and sensitive heroine. Loveday Ingram directs.