Sunbeam Girls 2 goes far beyond the original
SIXTIES nostalgia and JFK’s visit to Cork form the backdrop to The Sunbeam Girls 2, which runs at the Cork Opera House from September 20-24. Director of the show, Marian Wyatt, hopes it will draw in the large audiences that The Sunbeam Girls attracted in 2007.
Despite the title of the new show, The Sunbeam Girls 2 is a prequel. The Sunbeam Girls, based on interviews with former employees of Cork’s Sunbeam Woolsey textiles plant in Blackpool, was set in 1968 while the latest offering from Wyatt is set in 1963.
The new show is produced by PTP (Pat Talbot Productions), Wyatt explains that when Talbot (who recently retired from his post as artistic director of the Everyman Palace Theatre) approached her to direct a revival of the original play, she felt there was enough material to create a new show.
“Every now and then, someone would send me a scene or another idea about the Sunbeam girls. I kept it all in my memory bank. I don’t see myself as a writer but I can create ideas for scenes to evolve. In the middle of the night in May, I was struggling to put a storyboard together for a meeting with Pat.”
What inspired Wyatt to introduce the JFK angle was an article she read by TP O’Mahony in the Irish Examiner. He was writing about the ease with which President Kennedy travelled through Cork city in his open-top car compared to the massive security that was employed for Barack Obama’s visit to Ireland this year. O’Mahony also referred to a mystery caller to the then Cork Examiner saying he had overheard a conversation among foreigners in the bar of the Metropole Hotel the night before JFK’s visit to Cork. They were talking about assassinating President Kennedy.
Wyatt tapped into that story. But her tale is not one of espionage and intrigue. “I had been given a brief by Pat to keep the show light, charming and uplifting. I wanted it to have romance and laughter. After getting feedback from a focus group, I put the script together.”
Drawing from her research for The Sunbeam Girls, she noted that one of the characters lived a very simple life — and gave her a secret. “For years, Nellie had been writing to a Cork man called Vincent who had emigrated to America. I decided that he was going to come home in his role as a secret service man, working on Kennedy’s visit. It became a bit like a Cinderella story with Nellie getting ready to go to the ball to meet this man. While writing to Vincent, Nellie had pretended that she was her friend, Hannah, who used to go out with him. When Vincent went away, Hannah asked Nellie to write to him and let him down gently.
“But Nellie didn’t do that. She pretended to be Hannah. What Nellie didn’t know was that Hannah knew what she was doing. Hannah also knew that Nellie had fallen in love with Vincent. We don’t meet Hannah in the story. She has passed on but before she died, she wrote to Vincent and told him that if he loved Nellie as much as Nellie loved him, then he should do something about it as life is so short.”
What ensues is not just romance but also, heroism. Nellie and her friends overhear the foreigners’ plot to kill JFK but the authorities don’t believe them. “The girls decide to do something about it. This is where the humour really shines, with the girls doing everything to save the day.”
Wyatt has even introduced a strand to the story involving JFK’s wish to visit the Sunbeam Woolsey factory. “There is no development regarding the plot to kill Kennedy. It’s just a device in the show.”
The show is full of Cork wit. “It’s very humorous and quite slapstick. It has a very innocent kind of fun.”
The cast of 33 includes ten principals. A community cast is also involved. The actors include Irene Warren, Shirley McCarthy, Sally O’Leary, Sarah Burke, Angela Newman and Valerie O’Leary. Charlotte O’Byrne, who used to work in the Sunbeam office, is also in the cast. “It’s great to have her on board; she’s like a walking historian.”
Wyatt describes the show as being “high octane. The cast has to be able to sing and dance. It’s not a musical but the transitions from one scene to the next rely very much on the actors being able to break naturally into song. As I learned from the last show, the audience really connects with the singing. Before, we used recordings. For this show, the actors sing a capella and perform some lovely vocal harmonies from the era.”
Seldom has nostalgia been so assiduously mined.
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