A surprise hit in the West End, Daisy Pulls It Off celebrates the world of the traditional girls' boarding school story.
Denise Deegan’s play Daisy Pulls It Off, first performed in 1983, is an affectionate pastiche of the classic girls school story. Chock full of slang like “topping”, “jolly” and “scrummy”, the play concerns a scholarship girl from a poor family called Daisy Meredith, who attends the exclusive Grangewood School. The plot involves hidden treasure, a long-lost father, a conceited prefect, and the traditional lashings of hockey matches, secret passwords and dormitory pranks.
The most obvious difference between Daisy Pulls It Off and other school story parodies such as St. Trinian’s is the obvious affection Deegan has for the stories of writers like Angela Brazil and Eleanor Brent-Dyer. The critic Ju Gosling has written approvingly of Daisy Pulls It Off (in an essay entitled Laughing at Ourselves) contrasting the play with works by “male parodists” which “reveal their fear of what is represented by the genre by parodying it”. Gosling also cites reviews and interviews with those who have produced the play, arguing that it is not a satire on the genre, but a loving homage to it.
The comedy in the play is certainly fairly gentle. It rests upon a cheerful recognition of the sometimes unrealistic conventions of the girls’ school story, and an agreement between cast and audience to revel in them for the length of the play. There is very little satire of the genre, or of the public school system, and many of the jokes require the goodwill which comes from long familiarity with school stories to make them funny.
This is not to suggest that the play is simplistic. Daisy Pulls It Off is actually a play within a play, framed by a prologue which treats the audience as if they are visiting parents at a celebration of Grangewood’s 25th anniversary, and presents the main play as an entertainment staged by the Fourth form. The characters’ habit of introducing themselves to the audience, (“Sybil Burlington, Vice-Captain of the Upper Fourth, and conceited, beautiful, only daughter of very wealthy parents”) recalls similar metatheatrical devices in the work of playwrights like John Godber. In Daisy Pulls It Off, however, the technique doesn’t seem to be deployed to distance or ironise the action, but to draw the audience further into collusion with the cast.
Daisy Pulls It Off is definitely a show for those who already like boarding school stories, and arguably its style suffers by comparison with the mordant brilliance of the Molesworth books, or the sophistication of Trouble At Willow Gables. On its own terms, though, it is a cleverly written and warm tribute to a much-loved genre.
