Babs
– This is the story of Dame Barbara Windsor, the Cockney kid with a dazzling smile and talent to match..
This is the story of Dame Barbara Windsor, the Cockney kid with a dazzling smile and talent to match. Preparing to perform in the theatre one cold evening in 1993, the cheeky, chirpy blonde Babs recounts the people and events that have shaped her life and career over fifty years from 1943 to 1993. She contemplates her lonely childhood and WWII evacuation, her decision to go from Barbara Ann Deeks to Barbara Windsor - inspired by the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, her complicated relationship with her father, her doomed marriage to Ronnie Knight, capturing the attention of Joan Littlewood and becoming the blonde bombshell in the Carry On films. Babs, ever the consummate professional, never lets her fans down whatever her personal anguish and steps on the stage to rapturous applause.
07 May 2017
English
Dominic Leclerc
Tony Jordan, Barbara Windsor (based on book by)
Samantha Spiro, Charlie Archer, Nick Moran, Honor Kneafsey
In 1993 middle-aged actress Barbara Windsor sits on a stage, conversing with John Deeks, the dead father who recognized her talent as a child but disappeared from her life after her parents divorced, her mother giving her her stage name. From stage school Barbara starts singing at Ronnie Scott's club, where she meets the charming but crooked Ronnie Knight, ending up a pregnant prisoner's wife, in need of an abortion. Things look up when she joins Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop group and gets a part in Lionel Bart's 'Fings Ain't Wot They Used to Be'. Film and television parts slowly come in, notably the 'Carry On' franchise, and despite Joan's warning that Barbara may be type-cast as the perpetual dumb blonde Barbara is smart enough to exploit the persona, acquiring a handsome young husband and becoming a national treasure.