Made In Dagenham

Made In Dagenham

Adelphi Theatre, London

William Russell

DIRECTED by Rupert Goold, with splendid sets by Bunny Christie, a brilliant and tuneful score by David Arnold and witty lyrics by Richard Thomas, this reworking of the 2010 film about the Dagenham car plant workers' strike in 1968 for equal pay is quite simply the best British musical in years. It has its flaws, but the sum of its parts, while they may not make a perfect whole, add up to dazzling entertainment.

The book by Richard Bean is the problem. It varies in tone from a straightforward account of the strains placed on the marriage of the leading striker, Rita O'Grady (Gemma Arterton) to downright caricature and farce - Harold Wilson is portrayed as a buffoon exiting into a cupboard at one point - when dealing with the politics and the Ford bosses. Nor do I think Iraq and quantitative easing featured back then.

Arterton is fine, but gets by more on her beauty and acting skills than her singing talent. She does not rise to the final "big" song and needs all the support she gets from the chorus throughout the show, something a bona fide musical star would not have needed. But the cast and the superb production carry her along, the sets conjure up the car plant and the O'Grady home perfectly - Rome may not have been built in a day, but Dagenham was, someone says - and Sophie-Louise Dann does a neat turn as Employment Secretary Barbara Castle, who took up their cause.

It may be largely fiction, but so was the film. Act Two opens with This Is America, sung by the Big Boss from Ford, which nearly stops the show; how it will go down on Broadway, should the show make it there, is anybody's guess. The audience cheered: "You gave us Cilla Black. Thanks for nothing. You can have her back." The strike led to the 1970 Equal Pay Act, and that alone is worth making a song and dance about.