Arriving next week in the Town Hall is hit comedy show Dirty Dusting starring Adele King (Twink ). This is a hilarious play about three pensioner cleaners who start a telephone sex line...and that’s when the fun really begins.
The show introduces us to a trio of 70-something hard-working cleaners who are facing the axe. They might be past their best, beyond their sell-by date and over the hill, but they certainly won’t take threats of redundancy lying down.These game ‘girls’ set up a phone sex service, known as “The Telephone Belles”, and that’s when the fun really begins.
Their bosses don’t know about it, their families would never guess and their very willing customers are none the wiser.
They’re the only chat-line girls with dusters, attitude and their very own bus passes!
Dirty Dusting was written by two Newcastle Upon Tyne journalists Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood, it played first at the Customs House in South Shields and it quickly became the biggest and most popular play to come out of Newcastle in many years.
After the initial run at South Shields former Newcastle Theatre Royal chief executive Peter Sarah organised a 10-minute trial of Dirty Dusting in front of an intimate group of people at his venue. The audience was one of the toughest in the business – a group of the theatre’s own cleaning staff. Hearing their guffaws, he booked the show for a week. Sell-out performances followed and a new theatrical phenomenon was born.
Audiences just took to their hearts the hilarious tale of Olive, Elsie and Gladys – the cleaners who get down-right dirty.
Some 25,000 people in the north-east of England have seen Dirty Dusting since its premiere at the Customs House in February 2003. Only Shania Twain and Busted attracted more people to a show on Tyneside in the same 12 month period.
Dirty Dusting enjoyed three sell-out runs at the Customs House and then twice sold out the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, and then enjoyed a further run at the city’s Tyne Theatre and Opera House.
The show opened at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow on June 14 2005 with a huge advance - having been on-sale for only seven weeks. It was immediately re-booked at the theatre for November 2005 where it sold out and in the same run also played at the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, to huge audiences.
In 2006 the show came to Ireland and played sell-out runs in Limerick and Waterford along with a four week sell-out season at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, the show has played 3 futher Irish seasons and tours.
Dirty Dusting has garnered rave reviews wherever it has played. Metro called it “a great piece of feel-good entertainment with widespread appeal. It has so much heart you can’t help but be won over” and the Newcastle Evening Chronicle hailed it as “a side-splitting comedy about friendship and solidarity that will appeal to you if you’re 28 or 88!”
The Irish cast of this smash hit show is headed by stalwart trouper Adele King, aka Twink, referred to by every magazine and newspaper in Ireland as the Number One female entertainer in the country. She has been a professional entertainer since she was five years of age and is well known as a singer /dancer / actress/ comedienne in musical theatre. Her main work in Dublin London and The USA has been primarily light entertainment, in theatre and television. Galway audiences would have revelled in her appearance here not long ago in another hit stage show, Menopause the Musical.
Joining Twink in Dirty Dusting are veteran actors Eileen Colgan (best known as Glenroe’s Mynagh ), Aine Ni Mhuiri (Lily in Fair City ) and Steve Blount.
Dirty Dusting plays the Town Hall from Tuesday 25 to Saturday 29 August at 8pm. It’s pure theatrical Viagra!
