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Dirty Dusting, a tale of three elderly cleaners threatened with redundancy who start up a sex chat line, hit the stage at the Corn Exchange on Wednesday night. The play premiered in South Shields in 2003, and is currently performed by Crissy Rock, of Benidorm fame, Leah Bell, Dolores Porretta, and Andrew Green.
The audience were vociferously amused from the outset, and by the end were overtaken with mirth. After all, sex is funny, and we British do like our innuendo. Think seaside postcards and Carry On. Think Les Dawson and Mrs. Brown’s Boys. Toss in a bit of slapstick and stick slapping and more references to coming than in the Festival publicity, and there have you have it. Dirty Dusting. A riotous smut fest.
Leah Bell as Glad (‘all over’) aka Madonna is the star of the show, and it is the late flowering of her sexuality and physical comedy that provides the most laughs. Crissy Rock is the worldly wise and weary Elsie (Kylie), Dolores Porretta plays Olive (Marilyn), whose sexless marriage was once punctuated by an affair with a Scoutmaster called Arthur, and Andrew Green is the arrogant boss with a furtive secret.
It’s a whole new world (hole, even) for the Telephone Belles from the minute the phone rings. There are misunderstandings about water sports, references to hand puppets, and revelations relating to crotchless panties. It’s a steep learning curve. Good times for Glad, as she and the previously disappointing (‘You could time an egg by him’) Billy reap the rewards of her re-energised libido, but bad times for the boss (domestic suction devices; don’t do this at home, kids) as his unusual fetish is exposed. The story ends with the ladies emerging victorious and the whole cast appearing in comedy S&M gear.
I’ve never heard an audience laugh so much and so often in the Corn Exchange. People absolutely loved it. They spilled out of the Ceres Hall with happy smiles, saying things like ‘Brilliant, really clever’, ‘A laugh’, and ‘Best thing I’ve seen for a long time’. To see that people enjoyed our Festival event so much was wonderful.
I laughed twice. Something just didn’t sit right for me. In the interval I talked to Lesley Mills, who voiced her concerns about the clichéd negative portrayal of older women and their sexuality in the show. We both found a couple of the jokes a bit gross, particularly the one about things dangling out of the aforesaid crotchless thingies. Which surprises me because neither of us are prudes, and I have a reputation for mildly vulgar poetry. We also struggled to place the play in a particular time. The characters seemed to come from the 70s, but even though the phones were old fashioned there were references to Google, credit card payments, and the odious Trump.
‘You realise it was written by men’ said a gentleman from the Festival committee, quietly.
Get over yourself, some might say. It’s just a bit of fun. There’s nothing serious about it. Lighten up a bit, for goodness sake! Fair enough, but this is 2018, and we are currently revising our view on what is and isn’t acceptable regarding what and how things are said about whom. If this play had been written in, or firmly set in, the 70s, I would have understood it as being of its time and enjoyed it more. But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t ironic either. Which left me feeling slightly uncomfortable and confused.
Sorry to be a party pooper, people.
But I never did like Mrs Brown’s Boys.
© Gail Foster 17th June 2018
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