Extraordinary Women – Jermyn Street Theatre

Caroline Sheen and the cast of Extraordinary Women at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London. Picture: Steve Gregson

Extraordinary Women continues at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London until 10 August 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Little read today but best remembered as the author of Scottish-set romps Whisky Galore and The Monarch of the Glen, Compton Mackenzie published his lesbian frolic Extraordinary Women in 1928, the same year that Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness appeared. I had never heard of it previously, but this chamber musical adaptation by Sarah Travis and Richard Stirling suggests that it’s as whimsical as Woolf’s gender-bending classic and a good deal more amusing than Hall’s earnest tome.

Originally performed by Guildford School of Acting students in 2021, it’s an impressionistic and capricious piece of work and it isn’t easy to summarise what it’s about exactly. Set in 1918 on the island of Sirene (a fictionalised version of Capri, which was home to a thriving queer scene following the Great War), various bohemian women with romantic-sounding names waft around dropping bon mots and looking fabulous (costuming by Carla Joy Evans), while doubling as an ensemble of ‘sirens’ who keep an eye on things and stick their noses in to add to the mischief, in the spirit of the Greek gods or the fairies from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe.

Travis’ score features classical romanticism, operetta, jazz, ragtime and tango, and is often light and sparkling, particularly in the ensemble numbers (some of the solos are on the bitty side). Stirling’s lyrics and book are literate and witty. The lively direction by Paul Foster makes the intimate Jermyn Street Theatre feel much more expansive that it really is and the gracefully stylised choreography by Jo Goodwin and Alex Marker’s classical grotto set design contribute to the hedonistic holiday feel.

At the centre of the misbehaviour is womanising Swiss Italian adventuress Rosalba, whose currency is her charm. The sinuous Amy Ellen Richardson calls to mind Marlene Dietrich and her contemporary counterpart, the great Ute Lemper (like Lemper, she would be an excellent Velma Kelly). Rosalba’s on-off lover Aurora (‘Rory’ – the nervous Virginia Woolf to Rosalba’s dashing Vita Sackville-West), a demure heiress from Folkestone, has renovated a villa that she hopes will be their home together, and the tender Caroline Sheen gives the show its heart and emotional stakes.

The other characters are stock figures but enjoyable ones, played by Sophie Louise Dann (very funny as always) as Russian diva Cleo, Amira Matthews as brash America Olimpia, Jasmine Kerr as ingenue Lulu and Monique Young as helpful Olga and southern belle Zoe. Jack Butterworth plays all five male roles with multitasking aplomb, including Rory’s kind-hearted gay best friend Daffodil.

It’s possible to draw parallels with EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series (camp bitchery by the sea in Sussex), with shades of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April (in which four dissatisfied women rent a wisteria-covered villa in Italy). There are more entanglements than in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and there are also similarities with the recent Here We Are, with its surreal tone and rueful depiction of the empty lives of the idle rich. There’s no moral, except for the suggestion that none of these rich people’s problems count for much in the wider scheme of things.

Featuring a splendid two-man band with Sam Sommerfeld on piano and James William-Pattison on double bass and guitar, this is a production that defines ‘niche chamber piece’. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t easy to visualise it having a commercial run but it could become something of a cult favourite.

Julia Rank