Becoming Hattie To Be Performed at East Riding Theatre

It’s 1974 and eight-year old Jo is snuggled up on the settee idly glancing at the telly when there, on the screen, is a woman unlike anyone Jo has ever seen on TV. Jo knows, in that moment, the woman before her is uniquely like the woman she herself will become.

That woman is Hattie Jacques.

Forty years later, and Jo has followed Hattie’s footsteps; she too is an actress, but why does she only get cast as the nurse, never the surgeon? Why is she too fat to play Lady Macbeth? Why does she have a cupboard full of tabards? Could it be that nothing changed for women like Jo since Hattie did Carry On?

“Becoming Hattie” is a one-woman show, starring Ashley Christmas, which has been drawing critical acclaim for addressing contemporary issues around body image, sexism and sizeism. It can be seen at East Riding Theatre, Beverley, on Wednesday and Thursday, June 29 and 30.

Produced by Proteus Theatre Company, artistic director Mary Swan said: “My vision for the piece was to explore Hattie from a feminist perspective, using her life and career as a mechanism for exploring contemporary attitudes toward women’s bodies and the lack of body shape diversity amongst the women we are presented with on stage and screen.

“If our media continues to ignore and exclude larger women from our screens then nothing will have changed since 1978.”

Becoming Hattie is full of humour and charm and is sure to delight fans of Hattie’s most well-known work simultaneously lifting the lid on the life of the woman off-screen.

Performances on June 29 and 30 begin at 7.30pm. Tickets are priced £14/£15 and more information is available via the website, www.eastridingtheatre.co.uk