Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour

“This is our show,” say the Catholic schoolgirls of Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour as they stride on stage, fags in hand and surrounded by booze. From beginning to end, these six characters absolutely own the raucous narrative they tell. Their lives might seem to be spinning out of control, but they’re not letting anyone else speak for them.

Adapted from Alan Warner’s The Sopranos, the show accompanies these six schoolgirls to Edinburgh, where a choir competition is a good excuse for an afternoon of unbridled hedonism as they teeter on the brink of adulthood. It’s a checklist of teenage “issues”—pregnancy, cancer, sex—without ever feeling like an issue play. 

Adaptors Lee Hall and Vicky Featherstone have made two canny creative choices. First, they put music—from the schoolgirls’ repertoire of Mendelssohn and Handel to the hits of ELO—right at the heart of the show. Second, they give their protagonists full control of this wild 24-hour tour through their young lives, with the same six actors playing all the additional roles. 

The result is loud, mouthy and relentlessly energetic. The ensemble cast make brilliantly badass schoolgirls, causing havoc while a statue of the Virgin Mary looks down from Chloe Lamford’s Technicolor riot of a set. 

The storytelling might occasionally go awry, but crude charm wins through every time. And in a world that pressures women from every angle, it’s refreshing to see six female characters in all their rude, messy complexity, refusing to be part of someone else’s narrative.