In 1968 the female machinists, who were working at the Ford plant at Dagenham, went on strike for equal pay and caused a national crisis. There are two ways you can do a strike on stage and film. You can do it seriously as John Galsworthy did with Strife (1909) or you can do it satirically as the Boulting Brothers did in I’m Alright, Jack (1958). You can also do it as a big glossy Broadway musical or you can do it as a gritty mini-agitprop piece and stage it on the Fringe.
Made in Dagenham (the 2005 film) was always in the same bracket as two other British films, The Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliott (2000). So it is not surprising that somebody should want to do to it what was done to the other two and turn it into a big, feel-good British musical, even if it meant, as with the other two, it would be diminished.
Billy Elliott, which opened in 2005, is still with us. But The Full Monty, which did well on tour, folded after only five weeks in London. It will be interesting to see what happens to Made in Dagenham, which has a book by Richard Bean, music by David Arnold, lyrics by Richard Thomas and is directed by Rupert Goold. Gemma Arterton heads a cast of resilient women and they include Isla Blair, Sophie-Louise Dann and Sophie Stanton.
The songs, however, are not memorable and Harold Wilson (played by Mark Hadfield) and the American executive from the Ford US head office (played by Steve Furst) are acted for such broad, crude caricature that a true story, and a key moment in Women’s Rights, is trivialized and ends up no more serious and emotionally involving than the strike in The Pajama Game (1954).