Save Our Ladies
A long awaited adaptation of Alan Warner’s much loved novel, director Michael Caton-Jones’ Our Ladies, has fallen off the UK film release schedules
Scotland, 1996: Teenage girls dancing to Edwyn Collins’ ‘A Girl Like You’. The same girls dancing into a takeaway, mucking about in a fast food outlet. Stop. A scene of calm. Five girls in white dresses, standing by a loch. Then… back to Edwyn Collins, and to a teenage girl smoking a cigarette outside a school with the signpost reading Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour. Welcome to the world of The Sopranos, the heroines of Alan Warner’s acclaimed novel, now realised on celluloid for the first time.
Warner’s The Sopranos was published in 1998, after his debut Morvern Callar (which was adapted for the screen by Lynne Ramsey in 2002) and its sequel of sorts These Demented Lands. Definitely not a US crime family, these sopranos were a group of working class Catholic schoolgirls from small town Scotland who, at the start of the novel, were about to travel to Edinburgh for an inter schools choir competition.
The novel has a twenty four hour timespan, beginning early in the morning with the girls gathering at school ahead of the coach trip to the big city. The nuns at the school have high hopes of the choir winning the competition, but the girls are just looking forward to a day out in the city and a booze and men fuelled all nighter when they get home. Initially presenting as a unit, through a combination of events in real time and flashbacks to their earlier lives, the reader starts to see the girls as unique and complex characters, each with their own sorrows, secrets and battles. By the end of the novel, when they are once again together as a group in the early hours of the morning, things will never be quite the same again.
The novel was received positively by both readers and critics when it was first published. It was the sort of book that friends would read and then loan to, or buy for, their friends. I was roughly the same age as Warner’s sopranos when I first discovered the book and, given my obsession with music, I was a perfect candidate for it.
The Sopranos is strewn with musical references but it’s also a book in which the importance of music is regularly underlined. There are references to Big Star and Liz Phair, but what comes across most strongly is Kylah’s adoration of the Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser, an adoration that contrasts favourably with the clumsy attempts of her male bandmates to musically ‘educate’ her by bombarding her with CD’s. CD’s that Kylah habitually listens to while getting ready to go out with the sopranos, and which she returns barely listened to, sometimes dabbed with foundation, often in the wrong cases.
Just as The Sopranos is a good music book, it’s also a good female coming of age book. The sopranos are five very different girls operating with limited agency and opportunity in the shadow of poverty. A future of teenage pregnancy hangs over them but, importantly, they are not caricatures. Instead Warner is on their side, cheering them on.
The girls don’t know at the start of the book that they have reached a crossroads in their lives and in their friendship (although you suspect that at least one of them is starting to realise it) but by the end of the night, they know they have. By then their stories have been told separately and together and the reader will have found the girl they most identify with, whether it’s Fionnula, Manda, Chell, Orla or Kylah.
Lee Hall saw the potential of the sopranos to travel more widely when he adapted Warners novel for the stage under the title Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour, a reference to the girls high school attended by the novels heroines. The play received its premiere in Edinburgh in 2015 before touring the UK, Australia and the US, garnering rave reviews and an Olivier award along the way. Recognising the importance of music to the text, Hall described the show, which included musical interludes performed by the cast, as not so much a play or a musical, more a gig. The rowdy atmosphere felt true to the novel, and the show came equipped with a suitably candid disclaimer:
“Prepare thyself for: Really really rude language, flashing lights, pyrotechnics, sexual references, excessive drinking, and extensive use of the smoke machine”
As in the novel, music took centre stage, but the likes of Big Star and the Cocteau Twins were replaced by more well known artists such as ELO; presumably for reasons of familiarity. The six young actors played all the parts, male and female, young and old, and performed all the songs with gusto, up to and including Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, a particularly evocative closing number. The show I saw at London’s Duke of York theatre in summer 2017 received a standing ovation.
After the success of the theatre adaptation it’s fair to say that talk of a film wasn’t entirely unsurprising, though director Caton-Jones has said that it took him 20 years to make it.
Emerging from the late 1990s into the Scotland of 2019, the film makers have been wise to provide context to the film and to state, as the character of Orla does in the film’s trailer, that it was a different time then. As a thoughtful review in Screen Daily acknowledged, there are aspects of Our Ladies that might feel uncomfortable in 2020 or 2021, and just as the novel has had to change it’s name to allow for the success of US TV show The Sopranos, so a show such as Derry Girls has occupied similar territory to Our Ladies in some respects.
With those caveats in mind, Our Ladies received a strongly positive critical reception following its premiere at the BFI Film Festival in London, and it is fair to say that the film’s release in April 2020 was keenly anticipated, particularly in Scotland.
Then, the pandemic happened.
Cinemas closed. Films were rescheduled for autumn. Then rescheduled again.
Our Ladies was originally moved from an April release date to one in September, but on the 14th August 2020 the site filmstories.co.uk reported that this “terrific” film had sadly dropped off the UK release schedules.
The decision to pull Our Ladies would have been made at a time when parts of the UK were under local lockdown (including parts of Scotland) while other parts of the country were operating with barely any restrictions and the UK government were hassling workers to go back to the office.
Fast forward to January 2021 and the prospect of UK cinemas re-opening anytime soon looks unremittingly bleak. With this in mind, it’s perhaps more understandable that Our Ladies wouldn’t have a cinema release date, but it’s a hard blow to take and it would be unforgivable if the film was simply left to rot on the shelf without any kind of release at all.
Most people haven’t seen it yet but the fact that it has been so keenly anticipated, that fans of the book have been waiting for it for so long, means that there are a lot of people who have heavily invested in this film, and who are willing it to succeed.
This is a film with five strong female leads, something that would (sadly) be remarkable enough, even without taking into account the Scottish accents and the working class roots. What’s more, these characters are not stereotypes, they are complex and multi faceted young women who are angry, loyal, but ultimately uneasy of their place in the world. And they are all too often silenced and unheard. Bond might have to wait a long time to die, but the voices of five Scottish schoolgirls need to be heard more urgently.
