Review: Sisters of Mersey at Liverpool's Royal Court ****

The Sound of Music is one of playwright Jonathan Harvey’s favourite things – so perhaps it was only a matter of time before he answered the murmur of matins and the clarion call of compline.

Although Sisters of Mersey, his new knockabout comedy at the Royal Court, owes more to convent crime capers like Sister Act and Nuns on the Run – and indeed even to Shakespeare - than it does to skipping around Salzburg in a pair of old curtains.

Saying that, there are nods to that holy mother (Abbess) ship if you look for them. In one early scene for example, eyes are rolled when Lindzi Germain’s singing sister is hopelessly late for mass, while later a doorbell chimes a brief do-re-mi.

Harvey made his Royal Court debut last spring with his Eurovision belter A Thong for Europe and was keen to follow it with something more bespoke for members of the theatre’s unofficial rep company.

Fast forward 14 months and Thong’s Lindzi Germain, Keddy Sutton and Emma Bispham form the engine room of Sisters of Mersey, although Gabriel Fleary – who appeared in The Scousetrap in 2022, and Royal Court newbies Natalie Blair and Keshia Santos more than hold their own amid the unholy action.

Germain and Sutton (swapping Sonia’s pink balaclava of last year for her signature impersonation of Cilla) are Sisters Petra Pottymouth and Fionola Foghorn, supposed ‘identical’ twins who have always been told they were left on the doorstep of St Elmo’s Convent in Dingle during the May Blitz.

Above: Sister Petra Pottymouth (Lindzi Germain) and Mother Mary Monobrow (Emma Bispham). Top: Sisters of Mersey. Photos by L1 Photography.

Fast forward to 1986 and a deathbed confession by the convent’s handsy monsignor reveals they’re not actually sisters after all – although Petra does actually have a real twin living outside in civvy street.

Setting out to find her long lost sibling, the sweary Sister and a haplessly naïve Fionola become embroiled in all sorts of shady shenanigans surrounding a stolen jewelled alter cross, yet more identical twins (a veritable comedy of errors) and a cunning plan involving Dickie Lewis’s ‘appendage’.

The action pinballs between the Dingle convent, ruled by Bispham’s radio presenter-turned-nun Mother Mary Monobrow, and the big bad world outside its gates, and moves between 1986 – complete with a thumpingly good 80s soundtrack (Eurythmics, Madonna, Carly Simon, Dexy’s, Bon Jovi, The Buggles) performed by the cast and on-stage band - and the current day.

Above: Sister Fionola Foghorn (Keddy Sutton) and Sister Petra Pottymouth (Lindzi Germain). Photo by L1 Photography.

Harvey says in the programme that he wanted to deliver ‘a night of fun and frivolity’ and he’s certainly achieved that.

It’s enjoyably larky stuff that doesn’t take itself at all seriously and provides plenty of preposterous plot twists and pantoesque moments along the way, although even the least prudish may conclude there’s an over-reliance at times on adolescent gags about genitals.

While the quality of Mersey is not quite strained, it might still benefit from an ice bath.

Stephen Fletcher directs the whole affair with vigour and a keen sense of comedy timing honed though many, many appearances in Royal Court shows over the course of more than a decade.

And movement director Carrie-Anne Ingrouille, who choreographed SIX the Musical, keeps the action both bright and tight on the production’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time-style set which is dominated by an illuminated building skeleton standing in relief against a sinewy monochrome map of Liverpool.