All a bit pear shaped

NO FAT JULIETS, Coliseum, Oldham to October 26
ACTRESS Sue McCormick — last seen in the Coliseum’s “Ladies Day” — apparently wrote this musical play to give her the sort of leading role she couldn’t normally get on account of her size. Well, except the role in Ladies’ Day, of course.

And as far as it goes, the ruse works admirably. It’s just about everything else about this play-with-music-comedy-drama that doesn’t quite work.

Beth — McCormick — is the rotund midwife in a TV daytime soap and helps out at her dad’s failing Lakeland hotel when she isn’t working — which is quite a lot of the time, since she appears to insist on auditioning for roles for which she isn’t suited on account of her size.

Beth prefers not to accept that and work within her obvious constraints, but to whine that the world doesn’t see her shape her way.

In other words, the evening is a slightly self-indulgent, wish-fulfilment story, with rather too many references to food and the Lakeland poets, not to mention so-so songs that seem to have no place in the evening except to point up the strangeness of it all.

Speaking of poets, the show starts out as a typical modern light comedy — amusing dialogue and situations, some scene setting with the other cast members and so on.

We meet Calum, the former love of Beth’s life, come to stay at the hotel while he directs a play. And yes he has a beautiful, thin, young woman in tow, cue much musing on the nature of fat and thin...

But then the evening lurches rather dramatically into pure fantasy, by having poet Percy Shelley come to life, able to walk through walls yet be fully corporeal as he dispenses live-for-today aphorisms, seduces the vulnerable Beth and helps the place come back to profit.

Who wouldn’t want to stay or eat in an hotel that had a chance of soup with added spectre?

Most of this is light-hearted enough; apart from the pretty poor songs, the banter is inoffensive and amusing, and McCormick and her character’s father (Robert Whelan) are a good team alongside pub regular Tom (Kieran Buckeridge), thin girl Bryony (Jemma Walker), Shelley (Richard Hand) and Calum (Mark Jardine).

It’s just that the whining about shape and weight doesn’t fit the general comedy of the show. Far better if this was an out and out comedy that made its point more lightly, or a straightforward drama — but either way, definitely without those songs.