It has been a year since Kay Mellor died, and thirty years since this play premiered at the Yorkshire Playhouse. This revival was a celebration of Mellor, her links to Leeds – and the Playhouse.
A Passionate Woman is about love, loss and family. The love for Mellor’s work was palpable in the enthusiastic reception by the largely female, mature audience. People who had followed her career on TV, loving her mix of humour and tragedy. Aware of the loss of a great Northern writer they were here to celebrate her life. Family was an ever-present theme. The play was prompted by a secret that her mother shared with her. Mellor’s daughter Gaynor Faye, provides a programme introduction to the work, where she remembers the talent of her mother and her ‘beautiful little Nanna’.
The play mixes comedy, family drama and the supernatural, elements that might not sit easily together in other hands. They are brought together by Mellor’s ability to locate any story in the everyday life of Yorkshire people. There was no doubt we were in Leeds. Mellor’s details ground her work wherever it is watched, but references to living on Reginald Terrace, travelling on the No 1 bus and shopping at Asda gave the local audience a sense of familiarity.
Rose Revitt’s set design manages to be both mundane and magical. The set rotates externally from attic to roof, but subtle changes also permit significant mood changes within each set. A dusty attic transforms into a romantic retreat, a suburban rooftop into a portal to another place.
The production is directed by Tess Seddon, who trained and lives in Leeds. Her understanding of the local vernacular without doubt adds to the success of the staging. The buttoned-up dry humour gradually relaxes to emit emotion. This is a play that has had many revivals over the years but I have noted that the most successful productions have always been in the North. I paused to wonder why we have a whole industry offering theatre breaks to London but none to Leeds, Manchester or Hull.
On the day of her only son’s wedding Betty, played by Katherine Dow Blyton, escapes to the attic. Here she reassesses her life and relationships. Dow Blyton, who worked with Mellor on Syndicate, plays the central role of Betty with conviction. Her humour covers feelings of frustration, regret and despair. The first act has the conversational tone of Mellor’s TV writing but the theatrical drama is significantly increased in the second act, when perspectives move between characters and time.
Her son, played by Tom Lorcan, switches between frustration and affection as he tries to talk her into coming downstairs to set off for his wedding. The arrival of her dead Polish lover, Craze (Michael Bijok), enables us to see a different side to Betty, to re-ignite her passion.
Familial relations are something that Mellor understood personally. From the broken, violent relationship of her parents to her own successful marriage, she drew upon personal observations. Mellow married as a pregnant sixteen-year-old but went on to study O levels, A levels and a degree as a mature student, then forged a successful career as an actor, writer and director.
For much of the play, her husband (David Crellin) is a distant figure. Initially the distance is physical. In the first act we only hear his voice as he calls out, looking for his wife below. The distance then becomes emotional as we learn about family dynamics in the household. However, Mellor never writes two dimensional characters and by the end of the play we understand his emotional landscape.
Thirty years is a long time but the play had not dated significantly. The central character is clearly looking back to her youth in the 1950s, as indicated by music and costume. The present of the play maybe the 1980s, but the concentration on familial interactions makes the plot timeless. A comment about the Nimble advert might not have been picked up by younger attendees. Yet the use of the same cultural reference by Aardman Animations in Wallace and Gromit’s A Matter of Loaf and Death means that a woman escaping by balloon still has relevance.
The play ends posing questions about passion. Is it something we feel in relation to others or is it something that lies within us all? Kay Mellor was a passionate woman: passionate about acting, passionate about Leeds and passionate about life.
https://leedsplayhouse.org.uk/event/a-passionate-woman/ Until 10 June.
All photography by Marc Brenner. Feature photograph shows Katherine Dow Blyton (Betty) and Michael Bijok (Craze).
