Calendar Girls head for the London stage

There's more nudity (acres of it) heading for the West End stage, though those who remember the heady days of Hair and Oh Calcutta! may not quite get the same thrill.

Milking a sound franchise, the impresario David Pugh is to produce a stage version of Calendar Girls in time, he hopes for Christmas. This was the heart-warming story of a group of Yorkshire Women's Institute members who posed naked for a charity calendar when the husband of one of them was struck down with cancer. It went on to be a hugely successful film in 2003 with Helen Mirren (pictured), Julie Walters and Celia Imrie.

Pugh has attracted a pretty bankable cast – with Patricia Hodge, Lynda Bellingham and Sian Phillips – for his show which will open at Chichester on September 16 before a hoped-for London run. Fully frontal and smutty, it will, of course, not be. The original calendar girls hid their modesty behind strategically placed cakes, aprons and kitchen utensils. (Continued below)

Bellingham, who plays Chris Harper, the role taken in the film by Mirren, told the London Evening Standard: "It is a fantastic script and gives the story a different dimension to the film – and it’s a play that offers decent roles to women of a certain age.

"I think it’s going to be empowering, not just for us but for the audience as well. I hope they stand up and cheer when we take our clothes off."