It is 1966, and at first glance the scene is an unassuming one. Four women arrive in a drab, leaking attic room above a hotel, away from judgmental community eyes, for an evening of socialising and, for one night only, a visiting beauty girl from Revlon who promises makeup tips and free samples.
Yet this is not just any town, and not just any collection of women either. This is Aberfan, and the women are grieving mothers, still coming to terms with the devastating loss of their children, with grief, loss, and trauma looming large for each of the four in this immensely powerful revival that marks sixty years since the disaster, which took 144 lives, including 116 children.
The Aberfan disaster in October 1966 is one of Britain’s most devastating moments, and one of its darkest. On 21 October, after a spell of heavy rain, a coal mining spoil tip collapsed, having been built on a mountain slope over a natural spring, sending slurry violently into the village, engulfing a row of houses and, devastatingly, Pantglas Junior School. Told so vividly and so awfully by the women in this play, the emotional violence of the event is almost indescribable, with Neil Anthony Docking’s play giving a voice to the mothers whose children never came home from school that day. The leaking roof that hovers over the characters, dripping live into a bucket on stage, creates a constant soundscape that punctuates the tense silences, while also serving as a painful reminder, on this stormy evening, of what the rain brought to the village.
Over 80 minutes, Docking’s play takes place in real time as endlessly positive Sian (Charlotte Gray) coordinates this secret meeting between the women of Aberfan and Revlon representative Charlotte (Antonia Kinlay). To begin with, it is hushed and hidden, but it soon transpires that the reason for keeping the meeting secret is not because of any danger, but because the women are aware of the perception others may have of them focusing on beauty in the aftermath of such horror. But this is not a play about vacuousness; moreover, Docking’s script is sharply precise, taking time to move through each woman’s grief and trauma, and their desire to find themselves again.
Much of the production is pulled together by Sian’s desperate attempts for the meeting to be a success. Gray’s portrayal, a reprisal of the role from a decade before, is energetic and relentlessly smiley, wanting to preserve the event as something light for the women who have suffered so much. Yet one of the play’s standout moments, and there are many, is Gray’s extraordinary delivery of an extended monologue where Sian reveals her true motives for wanting this meeting to succeed. The anguish on her face, as her newly lipsticked lip quivers while exploring the consequences of the disaster on her marriage, is captivating, and it is in these moments that Docking makes the right choice in allowing the emotion to linger, letting Sian’s pain sit with her, Charlotte, and the audience.
Kinlay’s bright-eyed, immaculately made-up Revlon saleswoman is a neat contrast to the authentic Welsh housewives, yet this is a sensitive rather than dismissive portrayal. Kinlay captures Charlotte’s struggle to comprehend what has happened to these women with precision, representing the nation’s response, willing to donate but unsure of what to say or how to behave around them. While Docking’s final revelation about the character could perhaps be seen as a moment too far, it does work here, reminding all five characters of the universality of the emotions they are experiencing, even if the causes are so awfully unique.
Yet Docking avoids the play becoming too heavy either, with much of the work laced with precise one-liners and even some outlandish moments that utilise comedy to help the women reconnect. Mirain Haf Roberts’s brash Rona is loud and defiant, slinging insults and profanity around the room, capturing her domineering character. As the play unfolds, it reiterates why Rona is so bullish too, used as a vessel by Docking to voice the community’s anger about governmental cover-ups, capitalist greed, and the sense of abandonment felt in the aftermath.
Meanwhile, Llinos Daniel’s Jean, a delightfully upright vicar’s wife on various committees in the disaster’s aftermath, works as the target for much of Rona’s ire, where her new pregnancy, and the personal relief that one of her children still lives, make her an antagonist for Roberts’s Rona. Both women exchange insults amid fiery interactions, but there are also moments of great tenderness between the pair, while each is given time to pour out individual anguish in poignant monologues as the piece moves towards its end.
This is, though, the undoing of some of the piece. For much of The Revlon Girl, the dialogue moves organically, yet the inclusion of each character’s reflective monologues, while powerfully delivered, almost back-to-back, feels a little cluttered, making a piece that hinges in part on reconciling with an event both predictable and unpredictable feel a little too telegraphed.
Perhaps, though, the most engrossing character is Hedydd Dylan’s still evidently traumatised Maralyn. Nervous and jittery, Maralyn latches on to conspiracy theories, children’s drawings, and even the advice of a medium to try to make sense of the incomprehensible. This leaves her on the edge of madness, with Dylan cutting a painfully fraught figure, constantly fidgeting and, at times, wearing a vacant stare. Maxine Evans’s direction of all five women in this piece is precise, but it is the careful creation of Dylan’s Maralyn that, behind all the noise of the others, exposes the cruel reality for all these grieving mothers.
The Revlon Girl is a short yet impressively evocative piece that handles the real-life source material with great care while generating such richly dynamic characters. There are many moments in this production that are utterly superb, and while there are one or two structural missteps, Docking’s play remains a deeply profound and terrific tribute, sixty years on, to those who lost their lives and those whose lives were destroyed in such an awful way.
