In Nell Dunn’s play,Steaming,we find Josie fantasising with her feet in the pool at the local bathhouse:“I’m lying nude by the river and a man in a beautiful white suit I’ve never seen before comes and kneels at my feet and begins to kiss them kisses me all the way up my body . . . ahh ”
Lynette Curan,Amanda Muggleton and Kate Sheil on stage at the Seymour Centre.Antonin Cermak
When Josie hears the news that the council is closing the municipal baths,her first reaction is where will she have her fantasies. Beyond the warm,intimate atmosphere of the English-style,Turkish baths,there isn’t much room for them.
Josie,the working class blonde,played by Amanda Muggieton,can never find the money to pay her bills. She lives off boring sex obsessed men because she says the only job she could get would be a mundane one stuck behind a counter at Boots. Her son is in Borstal,her husband in prison and her flat′s freezing cold.
As the play unfolds,Josie more than any of the other five women who regularly meet to luxuriate in the steam and sweat out all the London muck and grime,undergoes a complete transformation. At the turning point,Josie admits her thoughts about the future:“I want to be somebody,to have done something. At the moment all I’m going to get on my gravestone is:‘She was a good!’ I don’t want to be remembered for that.”
Amanda Muggleton:“At the beginning of the play,Josie has nothing in common with the others.”Staff photographer
Amanda Muggleton loves her part as Josie whom she describes as “a tart with a heart”. After playing Chrissie Latham in Prisoner for three and a half years,she says Josie’s Cockney words are so beautiful and they come easily.
“Josie’s whole education is that you settle down,get married and have a baby. That’s what her mum did and so that’s what Josie did. At 21. Big John got sent down and Josie goes out and looks for another man.”
Josie accepts beatings,black eyes and desertions as part of her relationships with men until Nancy and Jane teach her there’s an alternative. “At the beginning of the play,Josie has nothing in common with the others. She’s got a chip on her shoulder and thinks that upper class people have a better life than she does.”
Gwen Plumb (foreground) and the cast of Steaming.Staff photographer
As the women first enter the white tiled Victorian bath shrine Nancy (played by Lynette Curran) shyly undresses in a tight towel,Mrs Meadow (Gwen Plumb) and her retarded daughter Dawn (Genevieve Lemon) wrap up in sheets of semi-transparent pink plastic and wear flowered bathcaps while Josie quickly strips and parades about uninhibitedly inspecting boils under her left breast.
The six women in the play,who come from different backgrounds,swap stories while they broil in the steam,plunge into the cold bath and are rubbed down by Violet (Joan Sydney),the attendant. They become friends and Nancy becomes Professor Higgins,correcting Josie’s speech,and Josie offers her a vibrator. Under the threat of the baths closing,the women band together to fight the council. Josie,to her surprise becomes their articulate spokeswoman.
Foreign to Australia,municipal bathhouses were once an English tradition for working class families without bathrooms. They still exist in London’s older suburbs and have become popular for the body beautifuls in the 70s,says Amanda.
Steaming’s playwright,Nell Dunn,spent several months lying naked on a towel in the swirling steam on Ladies Day at her local Fulham bathhouse,listening to the conversation of the women around her. From her notes she wrote a comedy which originally opened in London’s working class East End before it was moved to the salubrious West End theatre belt. Last week,it opened on Broadway and tomorrow it starts at the Seymour Centre.
“I think the whole point of Steaming for Josie is that she finds out you shouldn’t accept the status quo. You’ve got to be what you are but Josie’s energy is so diffuse and she’s only concerned about sex,clothes,make-up and money. At the end,all that energy is brought together to centre on the fact that the baths are closing.”
Our theatre critic H. G. Kippax wrote of the play “We are lucky to see it first after London,and in so good a production. Tough,tender,funny,warm and oddly moving,it should be popular.”