Reinventing the basic idea of The Full Monty, Trevor Wood and Ed Waugh's comedy has three elderly cleaning women responding to imminent redundancy by setting up a telephone sex line.
Olive, Elsie and Gladys aim to achieve a quick clean-up by manning the lines in their office over a single weekend, thereby earning a final pay-off worth three months' wages.
The fact that the characters' names have been displaced by at least a generation - they are the kind elderly cleaning ladies might have had in the 1960s - is enough to indicate that we are in the clock-stopped world of the British seaside postcard.
The boundaries may have shifted far enough to include references to water sports and flavoured condoms, but the Donald McGill spirit of double-entendre lives on in this witless saga of lonely men and vacuum cleaners.
Nothing in the play, from the nasty demeanour of the obnoxious supervisor to the chatline-inspired sexual renaissance of Gladys's marriage, has the ring of truth about it. It is impossible even to be quite clear about the women's ages.
It's also disturbing to find that actors can apparently no longer play the Alex without being amplified. It turns out that those oddly anachronistic head-scarves serve a practical purpose in concealing microphones, while the one male character's is clearly visible.
Juliette Kaplan, Kim Hartman and Sue Hodge set about this gruesome business in a true spirit of professionalism, with distinctly creaky support from Dean Gaffney, formerly Robbie in Eastenders. The theatre was packed and the audience loved it: apparently there's a real demand for mature ladies to talk dirty.
* Running time: One hour, 45 minutes. Until saturday
Terry Grimley
