Bombshells are a sure-fire hit

The Blond Bombshells of 1943
Hampstead
Dan Carrier

Blonde Bombshells, Alan Plater’s tale of an all-female dance band plying their trade through war-damaged ball rooms of 1940s’ Britain, has an underlying motive of passing on memories of an aging generation to a new audience.
The story works on three levels: firstly, as fire side, Werther’s Originals-style chat between a grandmother and her granddaughter about a special day during the war when she auditioned for a place in a swing band.
Secondly, it works purely as a concert showcasing some of the great numbers that kept the chins up during the dark days of the war.
And thirdly, and perhaps most subtly, the play rekindles the idea of the formation of a shared psychological state of mind of what it meant to be British.
And the show is simply great fun – the banter between the players shows Tufnell Park-based Plater at the top of his game. The one-liners bringing hoots of laughter rolling across the stalls (“My mother was in show business”, claims one of the girls. “She sold ice cream at the Odeon. When she got married, she walked down the aisle backwards.”)
We start in a darkened theatre that has recently been the victim of a direct hit by the Luftwaffe.
The core of the Blonde Bombshells – a touring troupe of lovely ladies who are a dab hand at blowing trumpets, trombones, plucking doubles basses and twinkling ivories – are waiting for four new possible members to arrive for an audition. We learn the rest of the band have run off to get married to GIs, after playing a gig at a US base.
The characters who walk through the door are pure Plater: an innocent schoolgirl who we later discover is the grandmother narrating the show, a show-stealing singing nun armed with a mini-banjo and a repertoire of seaside, postcard naughty songs whose double entendres are lost on her, and a frightfully posh young lady whose call-up papers has made her the driver of a sex-mad Colonel Carruthers.
Throw in a male drummer who is trying to escape the war by dressing as a woman, and the motley crew are in place for some great songs, superb jokes and a serious underlying message about how the country as a whole managed to survive six years of war with their sanity in tact.
Until August 12

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