This big-hearted new musical is rooted in a brilliant episode of real life. In 1985, three female mechanics, Ros Wall, Annette Williams and Roz Wollen, set up a car repair shop in Sheffield to create work in short supply in their male-dominated industry. Named in honour of trailblazing racing car driver Gwenda Stewart, the garage became a hub for women’s rights and protest in Thatcherite 1980s, notably against Section 28, the law prohibiting the promotion of the ‘homosexual lifestyle’ in education.
Sheffield-based theatre company Out of the Archive – whose goal is to make work amplifying the lives and histories of working-class LGBTQI+ people – have crafted their own story and characters out of interviews with surviving Gwenda’s Garage member Roz and its customers. Here, Carol (Eva Scott) is trying to keep the business afloat, while her colleagues, free spirit Terry (Sia Kiwa) and aspiring parent Bev (Nancy Brabin-Platt), navigate their complicated romantic relationship and trainee Dipstick (Lucy Mackay) gets to grips with the mechanics of life.
You can strongly feel the DNA of Northern comedies like Brassed Off or The Full Monty and queer films like Pride in Nicky Hallett and Val Regan’s book and lyrics. The characters are vividly drawn and the set-up is a storytelling gift through which to explore the turbulent 1980s and the profound impact of the political on the personal, from industry-gutted economic deprivation to media-inflamed sexism and homophobia.
If anything, the show’s admirable desire to document everything begins to bog down its storytelling, however important the issues. The engaging lightness of tone with which Jelena Budimir’s production springs into life – its energetically wry sense of humour – gets weighed down as characters become on-the-nose mouthpieces. As a piece of theatre, the show sometimes feels overloaded by all the things it’s trying to say and be, as the repair shop becomes a vehicle for everything.
But it’s hard to resist the love with which this production has been created – from the brass band-inflected exuberance of Regan’s score and music direction to the charisma of the ensemble cast. They keep the tempo going as they laugh at each other or grin at the well-intentioned white feminism of middle-class art teacher Feona (Georgina Coram). The show’s joyful punch-in-the-air defiance of bigotry and its pride in the story it’s telling is uplifting. And that feels important right now.