The new Ladies in Black television series, set in 60s Sydney, picks up where Bruce Beresford’s 2018 film (of the same name) left off, and presents a historical recreation that feels broadly right, yet fundamentally unconvincing. While the decor and set details are pretty good, this tepid milk-and-water drama reminds us that if the characters and story don’t feel genuine, everything else will tumble down around them. If you don’t believe the people, you won’t believe the period.
Director Gracie Otto (who recently made a wonderful documentary about her actor father Barry) smooths the edges of history, making a show that feels soft and staid despite being set in a period of profound social change, taking the view that the monochrome nature of society in the 50s evolved into full colour in the 60s.
The ladieswear section of a posh department store – the fictitious Goodes – is not an ideal place to observe revolution, hardly positioned at the vanguard of social change. Therefore it’s essential for screenwriters, Greg Waters, Sarah Bassiuoni, Joan Sauers and Randa Sayed, to emphasise stories of youth, doing so partly through the wide-eyed and ambitious “lady in black” Lisa (Clare Hughes), who balances her work life with university studies.
The script stresses that Lisa represents the forefront of change, handing her an early mini-monologue in which she insists to a friend that sex is the one thing “that separates the polite, pretty, husband-hunting debs who think, and create, and build lives and careers!” And that “all the free thinking, libertarian, emancipated women have sex!” Hughes, like the script, ends her lines with exclamation marks.
One colleague tells Lisa she’s “destined for a big life as an intellectual”, as if we were too daft to have grasped that very clear inference. Other characters also speak in very postured ways, though one comes close to having a narrative justification: Miranda Otto’s Mrs Ambrose, a pompous Briton who joins the team and looks down her nose at her eponymous colleagues, snootily delivering too-clever-by-half lines. Remaining characters include Polish-born Magda (Debi Mazar), who dreams of running her own business, and Fay (Jessica De Gouw), a sales assistant who is happily married to a Hungarian man and wrestling with whether to have children.
The writers share the focus relatively evenly, spreading themselves quite thin. Adding a little intrigue is the presence of Angela (Azizi Donnelly), a Lebanese-Australian acting as a kind of fashion industry double agent, stealing Goodes’ designs and aiding the production of knock-offs. Framing the drama from her perspective could have been a good way to mix things up and offer a fresh perspective, with the main story – originating in Madeleine St John’s 1993 novel – now feeling a little fusty.
The first episode contains something you don’t often see in an ABC period drama: a character with uncomfortably true-to-the-era racist, xenophobic and homophobic dialogue. This is Jenny (Eloise Mignon), one of the ladies in black, who kvetches to Fay about how “all the men in this place are either wooly woofters or married” and, on the subject of Fay’s marriage to a Hungarian, declares: “I wish I could bear the stink of garlic.”
Needless to say, the producers and screenwriters appear to have decided that this kind of dialogue is simply too uncomfortable, as Jenny is fired in episode one (this review encompasses the first three) and frogmarched out of the narrative less than 20 minutes in – her exit correctly indicating that this will be a sanitised view of history.
You can sense Otto wanting to inject some sass and energy into Ladies in Black, but those tight old frocks cling like straitjackets and all that stagey, unnatural dialogue doesn’t help. “Just because a man’s a wolf doesn’t mean a girl has to be a lamb,” a character says at one point; did anybody anywhere in the world ever actually speak like that?
Ladies in Black starts on ABC on Sunday at 8.30pm and will be available on ABC iView
