Theatre reviews: Remember you are beauty full | Legally Blonde

Julie Cullen in You are beauty full | Contributed

Remember you are beauty full, Perth Theatre ★★★★

Legally Blonde, Edinburgh Playhouse ★★★★

In the third decade of the 21st century, we surely all know - at least in theory - that women do not need a husband, or other male partner, to validate their existence, and give their lives meaning and status.

Knowing something, though, and actually feeling and believing it, are not the same thing; and here are two very different shows, on stage in Scotland this week, that both focus directly and powerfully on the story of a young woman learning to believe in herself as the central character in her own life, with her own gifts, and her own destiny.

In Matthew McVarish’s fine monologue Remember you are beauty full - first seen in a shorter Play, Pie, Pint version in 2012, and now exquisitely revived at Perth Theatre by director Patrick Sandford, who began his career there more than 40 years ago - our heroine Alanah is living alone in a tower-block flat in Glasgow, after the abrupt collapse of her marriage to a man she calls “baw jaws”, after only three months.

Two years on, the childless Alanah has a job in a young people’s advice centre, and a caring friendship with her elderly widowed neighbour Mrs Mazowska. She has also somehow become chief bridesmaid and party organiser for her best friend Zoe’s imminent big wedding; a task which is proving almost unbearably stressful, and provokes some memorably frank and foul-mouthed outbursts from a Glasgow heroine close to breaking point.

Amid this crisis, though, she is stopped in her tracks by a series of mysterious graffiti messages that start to appear on the wall beside her unreliable tower-block lift. The first says “Remember you are beauty full”; and it’s followed swiftly by other familiar loving phrases, used by her absentee dad, her mum, her ex-husband, and her beloved late grandma, who once urged her to “make your own dreams come true”.

Over a more or less enthralling 75 minutes we therefore watch Alanah - powerfully and sometimes heartrendingly played by rising Screen Scotland star Julie Cullen - gradually begin to free herself from a life entirely dedicated to helping and pleasing others, and to begin to live out the meaning of those wise affirming words. And her brilliantly watchable performance is supported, in Patrick Sandford’s heartfelt production, by Colin Ross Anderson’s fine musical score and soundscape; and by Emily James’s beautiful and evocative tower-block set, lit by James McKenzie, which helps conjure up the magic that can exist - just sometimes - even in the most ordinary settings.

Amber Davies in Legally Blonde | Contributed

As for Legally Blonde, currently at the Playhouse - well, it’s now an unbelievable quarter of a century since the release of the original film starring Reece Witherspoon, and 19 years since the birth of the hugely successful spin-off musical, back in 2007.

Yet the story of Elle, an apparently air-headed blonde sorority girl from California who follows her upper-class ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School in the hope of winning him back, remains hugely popular; simply because Amanda Brown’s original novel, on which it's based, is a classic text about a young woman learning to recognise her own power, and increasingly refusing to fit into any of the neat categories devised for women by a patriarchal culture - in this case, the category “dumb blonde”.

Elle is famous, in other words, for sticking to her own blonde and permanently pink-clad style - with adorable little lapdog stuffed under her arm - while gradually discovering her own potential as a truly great lawyer; and at the Playhouse this week, her story is delivered in terrific style by director Nikolai Foster and a fine touring company led by an irresistible Amber Davies as Elle. Does Elle get her man back in the end? Well, yes she does. By that time, though, she’s ready to say “no” to this patronising football jock of a beau; and that, friends and sisters, is exactly as it should be.

Remember you are beauty full and Legally Blonde both run until 3 October.

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