Bristol Evening Post review, 25 September 2008

Bond girls step out of 007's shadow

Bond Girls: Alma Tavern Theatre, Bristol

NOT so much writing in the margins (as Theatre West’s new season is entitled), but rather writing in a sort of purgatory for Fleming’s femme fatales. Tim Masey’s [sic] highly enjoyable and neatly written Bond Girls is the first of the company’s season of plays at the Alma.

Taking the sometimes empty female characters of the 007 novels, it explored four of these stereotypes with a constructional nod in the direction of Churchill's Top Girls. But these were not empty performances. These were four actors on outstanding form giving it the full vodka Martini treatment.

The setting was a bar with no way out. One by one they entered through a vortex of sound. Confused, with no memory and barely a story to tell, the girls set about trying to establish who each other was and their relationships with Ian Fleming.

There was husky tarot card-turning Brunette played with a shaken-not-stirred focus by Georgina Landau, Claire Skelcey’s sexy cool blonde who could sip champagne for England, an extremely funny Russian lesbian agent (Rachel Fagan) and bubbly Muriel, the jolly-good-show girl played perfectly by Muriel Wright [sic – actually played by Lucinda Holloway].

Director Shane Morgan wound up the characters and let them go for 60 minutes as they sent up not just Fleming’s hollow females but the hollowness of the Cold War itself.

The play continues until Saturday.

9/10

HARRY MOTTRAM