For many readers stories about schoolgirls will bring back happy memories of Enid Blyton, Angela Brazil, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and perhaps, Mary O’Malley’s Once A Catholic. When I think of schoolgirls, I think of Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s, not the films, but the actual spiky, anarchic cartoons.
Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour is Lee Hall’s adapation of Scottish novelist Alan Warner’s awarding-winning 1998 novel, The Sopranos, a celebration of 17-year-old choirgirls behaving extremely badly. Hall admits that his play is more like a gig than a play. Dialogue, production and acting all have a raw energy and relentless vulgarity.