Calendar Girls ready to reveal all on the Horsham stage

The show will run from Feb 21-25, with tickets on sale from the Capitol, with at least 50 per cent of profits going to St Catherine's Hospice, Crawley to support the work they do.

With music and lyrics by Gary Barlow and Tim Firth, Calendar Girls The Musical was inspired by the 2003 film starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters which was based on a true story. It tells a tragic but inspiring tale in which the death of a much-loved husband prompts a group of ordinary women in a small Yorkshire Women's Institute to do an extraordinary thing. Blasting away all preconceptions of what it is to be part of the WI, they decide to do an artistic nude calendar to raise money for charity.

Tess is playing Annie whose husband dies: “There is so much to the role. You have to show how much you love your husband. You have to show that it's a real relationship. They don't have any children and so their worlds are centred around each other. And you've got to show her hope that things can be fixed (when he is diagnosed with cancer), her belief that there is so much that can be done but then you've got to show her acceptance and then the real deep grief. The songs are really hard to sing without breaking down and crying. We have all known grief. My aunt has just lost her husband of 40 years and I will pull on that. We've all experienced grief. Your friends rally around you but in the moment it just feels like it is like you isolated with the grief. When it first happens, you think that you're never going to feel OK again. You’re crying yourself to sleep every night and thinking that you are just going to feel that way forever but somehow you do manage to cope and things do manage to move on and you do start to focus on the happy memories that you have.”

It is a show which says so much: “It just feels such an honour to be playing this part when you think of all that these women achieved.”

As for the nudity, well, that too is a challenge. After all you certainly don't want to be revealing too much to the audience: “Luckily Annie’s nude photo shoot is behind a cart with a lot of flowers on it. You come on in a robe and all your friends gather around you to make sure that you are in the correct position for the audience so that the audience doesn’t see more than they should! But you are singing all the while and everyone is singing and you're stripping yourself and you’re stripping your friends. It all very complicated!” Tess is chairman of HAODs and all the members of the cast are members of HOADS: “It's great to be able to do other things especially as this is giving 50 per cent of the profits to the Hospice. With HAODS it is a community company and you've got all the expenses and so you just can't afford to do that so it's lovely to be able to do that with this company now.”