Yes, but ... Alan Plater, writer of Blonde Bombshells of 1943
Amixed response greeted the new production of Alan Plater's Blonde Bombshells of 1943, at the Hampstead Theatre in London. While many critics agreed with Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph that it is an "enchantingly effective" celebration of wartime spirit, Robert Hewison in the Sunday Times found the story "desultory" and Nicholas de Jongh, in the London Evening Standard, felt the characters were "undeveloped" and the details "anachronistic". Alan Plater responds:
It may seem churlish to complain about reviews for a show playing to packed houses, especially when the Guardian, Times and Telegraph have been highly generous with their praise. But no self-respecting playwright turns down the chance of a churl.
Obviously, I'll fight for the right of any critic to say - to quote three items - that my writing is lazy, that I've set back the stage musical by 50 years and am guilty of "anachronistic homophobia". I won't fight to the death, you understand - maybe for about five minutes, or until I get a headache. Meanwhile ...
1 Concerning laziness: the Blonde Bombshells saga has been around my desk for about 18 years and there are around 30 versions on the computer. I was also taught by my English teacher in the fifth form of my state school in Hull that if, in an essay, you make an assertion about laziness, you must quote examples to justify your case.
2 It isn't a musical; it's a play about professional musicians who happened to be women. It works in Hampstead because I'm blessed with a brilliant company of actor/singer/musicians. Pick on them and I'll send the lads round.
3 The story is set in 1943 and the dialogue - which, in one short scene, uses phrases like "nancy boy" and "poof" - is in no way anachronistic. These phrases were in common currency in the north at the time and haven't yet disappeared.
But it's good that one of the more vehement of my critics confessed to singing along to Leslie Sarony's I Lift Up My Finger and I Say Tweet Tweet - an experience that even Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, in their pomp, were almost certainly denied.