20 – 24 May

With 2025 marking the 80^th anniversary of VE Day, the tour of Katherine Senior’s Spitfire Girls is timed perfectly to shine a deserved light onto some of the unsung heroes of the Second World War, specifically the members of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), whose job it was to ferry planes between airfields, factories and maintenance facilities on non-combat missions. Many of these pilots were women. According to Richard Poad from the ATA Museum in Maidenhead, over the course of WW2 “…1,250 men and women from 25 countries ferried a total of 309,000 aircraft of 147 different types without radios, with no instrument flying instruction and at the mercy of the British weather.” Spitfire Girls, although a fictional drama, is inspired by and entirely based on the little-known lives of real women who faced danger and discrimination on a daily basis. It is a remarkable story.

Senior did not just write the play, but stars in it too as Bett, the elder of two sisters who, keen to play their part in the war effort, leave their rural farming lives behind to join the ATA, much to the disapproval of their father. The play traces their journeys, in every sense, becoming both a poignant tale of the siblings’ trials and tribulations on the ground and in the air, in love and in war, as well as a document of social attitudes of the time, especially regarding the changing role of women. Whilst given solid support from their three fellow cast members, the show belongs to Senior and Laura Matthews, who delivers a sparkling and endearing performance as fearless, feisty and determined younger sister Dotty.

Told largely in flashback, the play opens on New Year’s Eve 1959 with the two sisters reminiscing on their experiences as ‘ATTA Girls’ some fifteen years before. The action unfolds on a simple raised hexagonal stage, adorned with the iconic Spitfire roundel. Staging and props are minimal for such a large stage with plenty of dark empty spaces, yet this merely heightens our focus on the drama which unfolds on the raised platform. Set changes are woven artfully into the fabric of the play, facilitated by period music and dance, and the whole piece is beautifully lit; lighting designer Peter Small makes clever use of a range of projections directly onto the stage, although whether this would be as effective when viewed from the stalls is less certain. Stephen Moynihan’s movement direction lends the production a balletic grace at times, whether through neatly choreographed scene transitions or through a highly effective flying scene, proving that shows do not need West End budgets to produce impressive set pieces, simply some creativity and imagination.

Senior herself admits that prior to writing the play, she “had never known that women had flown during the war”, a conflict which fundamentally changed the roles and jobs of so many women and which forms a central theme of the play. Director Sean Aydon wittily adds that “…these women’s stories had not been given the airtime they deserved”. Kirsty Cox’s Commanding Officer role is inspired by Pauline Gower, tasked with recruiting the first women into the ATA and who campaigned, successfully, for equal pay for its female pilots, with ATA becoming one of Britain’s first Equal Opportunities Employers. As such, the play strikes a chord with a contemporary society still riven by gender inequality and disparity, providing modern audiences plenty to both celebrate and contemplate.

Spitfire Girls is a surprise package, a moving, heartwarming, funny, relevant and very engaging play.

★★★★☆   Tony Clarke   21 May 2025 

Photography credit: Ant Robling