Off the boil

THEATRE Steaming Piccadilly Theatre, London

Interviewed by Playboy magazine in 1970, no less a figure than Mae West berated producers for using nudity to spice up old plots. "All the good ones have been used," she said, "and it gets monotonous." She had a point. Unscrupulous directors spent indecent amounts of rehearsal time persuading actresses that nudity was "essential to the plot".

By the time Nell Dunn's Steaming arrived in 1981, stage nudity was old hat, but the play revived the debate, although Dunn's undressing really was germane to the content. None the less, before curtain-up, I was puzzled by my inability to remember its plot. By the interval I knew why. There isn't any.

That's not quite true, but there's certainly precious little drama. Dunn throws together a group of women, carefully selected for contrasting classes and backgrounds, who bond over sessions in the steam of a run-down East London Turkish bath. At the end of the first half, we learn that the council is threatening the baths with closure and by the end of the play we have a sort of decision.

Dunn intercuts the life-stories of the ex-hippy, the repressed upper- middle-class wife, an aged mother and her semi-retarded daughter and the warm but doughty baths supervisor (a non-part given life by Diane Langton). Unfortunately, the stories sag beneath the obviousness of the looming punchlines and every perspective is laboriously discussed. Like the women, you lie back and let it wash over you. Unfortunately, with not enough laughs and less tension, you just wish that, like them, you could snooze.

Like Clare Booth Luce's famous bitch-fest The Women, men are a mere off- stage annoyance. It's a welcome change, but this female solidarity piece is obsessed with the opposite sex. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle? Not in Dunn's philosophy. Alas, her handling of the thorny problem of heterosexual feminism felt dated first time around. Sixteen years on, it hasn't worn well. Top Girls, it ain't.

Following the likes of Ronnie Corbett, Max Wall and Dawn French, the proceedings are pepped up by the casting of stand-up Jenny Eclair. The part of loud-mouthed Josie, a sex-obsessed working-class woman whose best friend is her Pifco (and we're not talking hairdriers), fits her like a glove and her welcome energy gives Ian Brown's lazily directed ramble a much needed lift. If the producers were smart, they'd have cast Mrs Merton, who could have turned it into a heated debate. Mind you, if they were really smart, they wouldn't have revived it in the first place.

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