The Girls of Slender Means review – Muriel Spark’s postwar tale told with zingy wit

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Expertly adapted novel about young women beginning adult life in the wake of the second world war is shadowed by trauma but full of life and merriment

We are in that open-ended time between a long collective trauma and the arrival of a Labour government. You will know the feeling, but this is not 2024. Rather, it is in the weeks after VE Day in 1945 when, in Muriel Spark’s witty novella, the young women lodging in the May of Teck Club try to establish career and love life on a shoestring.

Amid the uncertainty, there is merriment. These girls of slender means can still laugh. But just beneath the surface are wounds that linger like PTSD. At this time when “all the nice people in England were poor”, they have bottled up the bombs, the sirens and the reports from Belsen as part of their patriotic duty. Spark’s genius is to show pain and ephemerality side by side.