Crowd pleaser? You’d better believe it

LOVE in the attic . . . Betty (Kay Mellor) and ghostly lover Craze (Stuart Manning) in A Passionate Woman

A Passionate Woman, Oldham Coliseum
WE’ve just had Ghost the Musical and here’s its northern equivalent — Ghost The Attic.

But Kay Mellor’s A Passionate Woman, the current choice at Oldham Coliseum, is a far more personal event, based on the life of her mother and revised several times on stage, for TV and now for the stage again.

The comedy drama is rooted in emotional truths about middle-aged women, their relationships with their families and a lot of held-in pain from years of self-sacrifice. You can almost see the women of a certain age nodding in agreement with Betty’s world view.

And Mellor, whose investment is deep enough to now be playing Betty herself, is great too on the conversational details of life. The show opens with a dissertation of the merits of the Asda cheese counter, for example, and why not?

This playwright has always written about ordinary people and the things they do, whether in Coronation Street or Fat Friends — or any of her other down-to-earth dramas.

But where this play deserts her is in its unlikely plot, and recent revisions fail to persuade me otherwise.

Far-fetched soap plots have nothing on this, what with its ghostly lover in the attic, Betty’s retreat from beloved son Mark’s wedding, the idea that this woman, who dotes on her son, would come anywhere near to missing the event, and the most unlikely stage exit ever. These events are perhaps manifestations of her need to break free, but their improbability spoils what is otherwise a charmingly emotional work.

Directed by Gareth Tudor Price for every laugh that can be wrung out, the wedding day is the catalyst for mum’s feelings about a life lived in a loveless marriage and of a better thing — a free-spirited fling with a Polish man three decades before — that she let slip away. Her retreat to a beautifully-created attic and rooftop set is thus the signal for everyone to be worried, as she thinks over old times and her next move.

Kay Mellor is a powerful if scatty-looking Betty, all indignant energy and emotion, while Anthony Lewis as Mark is sympathetic and much put upon. James Hornsby almost makes husband Donald a real character rather than a comedy cuckold, and Stuart Manning is suitably slick and snake-hipped as Craze.

Enjoyable, emotional but far from realistic, this is nonetheless a crowd-pleasing, entertaining night out. To June 4