When Mary J O'Malley's serio-comic look at life in a Catholic girls' school in Fifties Willesden premiered at the Royal Court in 1977, it won a number of awards, including this paper's Most Promising Playwright prize. This tonally uncertain revival from Kathy Burke makes such plaudits seem perplexing, as we plough doggedly through an academic year at The Convent of Our Lady of Fatima in the company of the fifth form.
All the girls in 5A are called Mary but our interest lies with just three of them. There’s hapless Mary Mooney (Molly Logan), a perpetual yet inadvertent asker of questions laden with sexual innuendo. Mary Gallagher (Katherine Rose Morley) is the bright but spiteful one and Mary McGinty (Amy Morgan) can’t wait to free herself of the convent’s constrictive rules in favour of the possibilities of the real world. Around this trio and their blossoming hormones orbit some unsuitable boyfriends, a sexually frustrated priest and a selection of nuns who are caricatures rather than characters.
It feels like a long evening. On Paul Wills’s clever frame of a set, which is richly redolent of ecclesiastical architecture, a succession of rather effortfully connected scenes at the start fails to reveal much of a through-line. Mother Basil (Clare Cathcart) and Mother Peter (Cecilia Noble, with an uncertain accent) are grotesques who play unashamedly to the gallery. They hurl themselves furiously around the school, ensuring that a Catholic shame culture settles oppressively over every hint of teenage insubordination. Tampax are banned; missing Mass is declared to be a greater sin than murdering one’s wife.
Logan, Morgan and Morley break through the muddle of mixed-message atmospherics to deliver three perky central performances. Morley’s Mary G walks a fine line between in-school swot and free-time rebel and Morgan convincingly illustrates how Mary Mc, despite a liberal attitude to young men, can’t ever quite shake off her religion’s hellfire pronouncements. “Why didn't Jesus go straight to Dublin?” asks her infuriated boyfriend when she declares that Catholicism is the only true faith.
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