Steel Magnolias, directed by Lee Lewis. At Canberra Theatre, June 21. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias has almost everything going for it.

Its zippy script, full of scintillating one-liners, in itself guarantees a ripping night in the theatre and, with a cast of well-known stage and TV personalities, the huge audience in the capacious Canberra Theatre for first night was a dead cert.

That audience, it was notable, was dominated by women, and no wonder. The men are all off-stage and, ridiculed by even the most charitable of the female hairdressing salon patrons onstage, the steel magnolias of the title.

The setting in post-Vietnam 1980s small-town USA allows a period approach to the play, which follows community celebrations, a Christmas festival, and the arrival of a baby. None of these masks the tragedies of ordinary life, which can upset even the best hairdo.

Lewis puts her characters through their paces at a brisk trot in Act I, with the wisecracks coming thick and fast, especially in the hands of Amanda Bishop as the larger-than-life salon owner Truvy, playing it in broad brushstrokes.

But from Act II the tone is more serious, mostly centred on the young bride Shelby and her mother M’Lynn, played by Lisa McClune. The scenes between these two characters are the most affecting.

As the doomed but independent Shelby, Jessica Redmayne faces life with a wicked sense of humour and an even wickeder smile that belies her fate.

This is not a play that focuses on one or two characters only, and the other cast members, Belinda Giblin as Ouiser, Debra Lawrance as Clairee and Lotte Beckett as the overly sincere Annelle, all make their mark. These markedly different women, whether chatting over recipes and nail polish or planning the takeover of a local radio station, add to the kaleidoscope of human experience which this play canvasses.

There’s one very strange thing about this production. The naturalistic set by Simone Romaniuk evokes a hairdressing salon and is full of everything, including the sink, but strangely, has no mirrors.

Where are they? Almost certainly, they are us, and this explains why the actors are seen, quite strangely, speaking their lines not to each other, but directly out to the audience.

The cast of Steel Magnolias have likened playwright Harling’s verbal agility to that of Shakespeare. If he is a modern-day Shakespeare, then, like his Elizabethan predecessor, he is clearly holding the mirror up to nature — and we are the mirror.