The Gut Girls: June 2004

"Humane and hugely funny" was how the Financial Times described Sarah Daniels' sometimes shocking play. The Gut Girls, when it opened at London's Albany Empire in 1988.

Time Out, London reported: "Regarded as little better than whores by their contemporaries, the gut girls are portrayed in this vigorous and intelligent play as a boisterous, beer-swilling, strong-minded bunch, handy with a knife both in the gutting shed and outside it, definitely independent in attitude and scornful of the illusion of male supremacy."

TATS production, directed by Cathy Swift, was based on real events and set against the unlikely backdrop of a slaughterhouse in late Victorian Deptford.

It traced the lives of girls who worked in the gutting sheds and how their fortunes are changed forever when the sheds are closed down. The efforts of the well-meaning Lady Helena to convert the rough and ready girls into young ladies - and find them alternative employment - are not without their tragic consequences.

Carcass kindly loaned by the Meat & Livestock Commission	The Set

Gut Girls	Polly, Annie, Kate and Maggie

Jim & Len	Lady Helena in her drawing room with with Arthur Cuttle Smythe

Emily attends to Lady Helena	Annie & Kate

Lady Helena's club, featuring Victorian magic lantern kindly loaned by Mrs Val Illingworth

Priscilla Cuttle-Smythe and Nora	Maggie & Lord Edwin

Lady Helena and Lord Edwin

Pricilla and Lady Helena	The cast

Curtain Call	Maggie & Eady

Polly, Maggie, Kate and Annie