The Girls of Slender Means

This stage adaption of Muriel Spark's novel brings the Edinburgh writer's focus away from the capital's cobbled streets and sandstone facades. Set in West London, it is a play charting the feminine in the aftermath of the Second World War. Most of the narrative played out on the smoky, dappled set takes place in a women's commune – The May of Teck Club for girls of slender means.

It is a thorough production that makes full use of an imposingly large performance space. The stage is consistently busy, with sliding frosted panels manipulated to mark doors, walls and other, less literal divides. The narrative broadly concerns the martyrdom of a young man, formerly an anarchist poet, while preaching in Haiti. The breaking news of his death is interwoven with scenes of his meeting the girls, and, in a noisy climax, we learn the reasons for his conversion to Catholicism.

Those unfamiliar with the source material will find the narrative hard to plot. The timeline is fractured and promiscuous with its chronology – a deliberate device which gradually pieces together the work at large. However there is no doubting the clarity of vision. These girls are of slender means in both financial and sexual terms. Love and sex are in short supply, with traditional feminine imperatives left muddled after the “swirling tornado of war”. Well anchored in its period detail of wartime rationing and blackouts, director Muriel Romanes' previous handling of Spark material has served her well. This is a colourful production of a celebrated, though tricky, text.