Award-winning musical Clean! will highlight resilience and sisterhood in Eastbourne

A rousing celebration of women’s resilience and sisterhood, it won the Outstanding Show award at Brighton Fringe in June and attracted a string of five-star reviews.

Based on the winner of New Writing South’s Best New Play award at Brighton Fringe 2019, Clean: The Musical explores the lives of seven women living in the historic Roundhill (or Laundry Hill) area of Brighton through different eras.

Written by Sam Chittenden and Simon Scardanelli, it highlights how much has and hasn’t changed from 1880 to today.

Sam said: “It is a rousing celebration of women’s resilience through difficult times.

“Sisterhood is a common theme – from laundry to women’s hospital to modern female friendships.

“Other themes include suffrage, sexuality, mental health, domestic violence and – topically – the small-pox outbreak in 1950, which has eery parallels with Covid 70 years later.

“In exploring these stories we see how universal and modern these women’s experiences actually are.

“Roundhill is a conservation area with a rich history of service industries. It was home to a large number of laundries from the late-19th century, which provided work for local women, often independent of their husbands.

“The Tivoli laundry was involved in the 1950 smallpox outbreak.

“Roundhill was also the site of the first dedicated hospital for women with mental health issues, opened in 1905 by Dr Helen Boyle and her partner Dr Mabel Jones.”

Clean: The Musical will be live at The Grove Theatre, Grove Road, Eastbourne on September 25 at 7pm (135 mins including interval) with tickets priced at £12/10. Tickets from the theatre.