New stage

Currently swept up in ‘a beautiful, yet discombobulating, snow globe’ of touring Britain in Calendar Girls The Musical, which comes to Edinburgh next month, born storyteller Karen Dunbar talks to Janet Christie about loving the show, her 30 years in come

Karen Dunbar talks to Janet Christie about her role in touring show Calendar Girls The Musical

Karen Dunbar is naked. In nothing but a string of pearls and high heels she’s sitting on stage in front of an audience of hundreds in Newcastle’s Theatre Royal, playing the piano and singing her heart out. Along with co-stars Fern Britton, Anna-jane Casey, Sarah Crowe, Ruth Madoc, Rebecca Storm and Denise Welch she’s starring in Calendar Girls The Musical, Gary Barlow and Tim Firth’s hit based on the film, the play and the true story of the WI women who make a naked calendar, now heading north on a nine-month tour of 19 towns and cities from Aberdeen to Southampton.

Karen Dunbar is dressed. Fresh off the stage and between today’s matinee and the curtain call for this evening’s performance, she stands up to greet me, long legs now encased in black leggings, then sits and as she hugs one knee, her vest top revealing a dolphin tattoo on one shoulder. Slim and tall, she radiates the sunflower warmth that is the symbol of the show. It’s as if the nudity never happened.

Karen Dunbar is “discombobulated. Today I am here, the place to get food is there, the where I live is there, the theatre is here. I don’t know what month it is or what day it is, I just work by the clock. I’m a huge I am in the now, I am in the moment person, and largely, I don’t know if you need to change this quote, but I find it best to bring my head to where my arse is, because if my head goes too far into things, I lose it. So it’s where do I stand, when do I take my clothes off? Then there’s the packing and moving to the next place... and this show is very precise – don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot harder work out there – but the harmonies! And here’s me [Dunbar adopts a fruity, thespy voice] a veteran of performing, and I’m like ‘I don’t know WHAT. TO. DO!’ Fortunately the rest of the cast is great. I’ve never toured, apart from my own show and then I was home most nights. Now I’ve been away since July and it’s like being inside a beautiful, yet discombobulating, snow globe.”

We’ve got 30 minutes before Dunbar has to be ready for the evening performance and in the nicest possible way she’s keeping her eye on the time.

“This is no’ me being Madonna, just want to make sure you get what you need. I’d talk for ever, ask me the time and I’ll tell you where the watch was made.”

So how does she feel about getting her kit off night after night in front of hundreds of people as Cora, the single mother vicar’s daughter?

“I had feelings of nervousness and shyness and then I thought, 20 years ago, these women did it and I want to honour that, the spirit of it. And that shifted something for me, and I thought right, either don’t do it, or do it with gusto. So I don’t know what you saw today, but I hope you caught a bit of my gusto.” I did. “All gusto, but no gusset, there’s a tagline,” she sits back and laughs, much like the audience who have also cried, then risen to their feet to give the cast a standing ovation for their collective, life-affirming two fingers to cancer and its aftermath.

It may be about a naked calendar, but the nudity is like Jaws, where you never see the whole shark, and by the time the cast finally take off their dressing gowns, it’s almost incidental.

“At first I thought I’m the only one who is naked completely!” she says, eyes popping. “However, I’m the only one with my back to the audience and I’m at an angle, so even if you’re on the front row you can’t see. And there are nine of us doing it so that was very ameliorating, bonding.

“It isn’t meant to be a, pun intended, a titillating show. It’s meant to be a celebration of the women who had the bravery to do what they did, and their legacy, the money they’ve raised for Bloodwise, are raising right now, and it’s a homage to that.”

Fresh faced and open, devoid of make-up, one of the things she loves best about playing Cora, who also shuns lippy and mascara, with Dunbar what you see is what you get. “I will wear make-up if I must, professionally, but they didn’t want that, so that was perfect, because I like a wee bit of vive la difference,” she says, wearing a gleeful grin.

There’s no artifice, no mask, everything is written on her wonderfully expressive face. When she speaks she gesticulates, not so much with her hands, but with a face that has more bounce than Kim Kardashian’s trampoline selfies. When she’s being funny eyes pop, nostrils flare and her mouth boomerangs as she flings out words. When she’s listening, considering, all is calm and still.

She’s authentic, a quality Dunbar believes is true of the Calendar Girls The Musical, and one of the reasons for its success. Authentic to the story of the first naked charity calendar in 1998, produced by a Yorkshire WI to raise money to buy a sofa for the visitors’ room of the ward where one of their husbands was being treated for non-hodgkin lymphoma. When he died, it became about honouring his memory and about a group of women who achieved something extraordinary. One calendar became seven, the calendar became a play, then a film and now a musical, and so far, they’ve raised nearly £5m for Bloodwise, the blood cancer research charity. As we talk, the cast are outside braving Storm Ali with collecting buckets.

“I think it’s popular because it’s poignant and extremely true – there isn’t a person in the audience who cannot relate to it. And it’s written with such humour. To have an audience laughing their heads off and crying their hearts out with a true story that threads it all together, with great music. I love this show. I’ve loved the film, I’ve loved the play and when I read the musical I wanted to do it.”

Born in 1971 and raised in Ayr, she was adopted by her grandfather and grandmother.

As a child she sang at the Labour club, or for passers-by, and at ten she wrote in her diary, “Watch out world, here I come”. What would she say to that ten-year-old now?

“You don’t need to wear high heels, just because all your friends are wearing them. You don’t like them, they hurt your feet, and you’re tall