Event 7, Wharf Theatre, 5th June 2011

Anita Parry was a huge hit at last year’s Devizes Festival free fringe but this year you would have had to pay to see her one-woman show, What Would Helen Mirren Do?
She brought the show to the Wharf Theatre on Sunday night and, unsurprisingly, played to a full house.
She takes the role of Susan Butterworth, a member of staff at a supermarket in Oldham, who is offered the chance to rise to the role of supervisor.

During one of the management seminars she is required to attend in nearby Wigan, she is asked who is her role model. In a flash of inspiration she chooses the actress Helen Mirren.
It is, indeed, an inspired choice and enables her to cope with her sexist manager, a bolshie colleague and the problems of cutting free from her two grown-up children, one a boy with learning disabilities who has just moved into a community home.
Through her we meet her dependent, but unappreciative Irish mum, the hyper-enthusiastic seminar leader, the gushy management trainee from another branch and her own perky daughter.
We enjoy her final triumph over the vindictive boss to win a six-month placement at the Madrid HQ of the company that takes over the supermarket chain.
This is very much Victoria Wood country but it is more than just an amusing slice of life. It is a truthful reflection of the prejudice that women in the workplace still have to cope with 100 years after Emmiline Pankhurst.

Lewis Cowen