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Theatre:The Roaring Girl

The Roaring Girl's anti-heroine provides a rumbustious evening out at the RSC, says GORDON PARSONS

The Roaring Girl

The Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon

3 Stars

Jo Davis'S production of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's rumbustious city comedy opens this RSC season of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries which focus on women.

The play is sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue, both of which disarmingly provide a tongue-in-cheek admission that it will not please all its audiences.

The Roaring Girl was built around the life and activities of the epicene Mary Frith aka Moll Cutpurse, a well-known London underworld character of the time who, dressed as a man, took on society in the courts and even the stage.

The somewhat intractable plotting involves the standard business of the gulling and counter-gulling of the citizens by the minor aristocratic gallants after their money and their wives, with a love story thrown in for good measure.

With Moll in the lead, the women win out of course - after all, this is theatre.

Davis's production updates the play to the Victorian period, when the young toffs were given to "slumming" to indulge their curiosity and sexual appetites, an adaptation which necessarily simplifies the tortuous original language. Designed to please a Jacobean audience with an apparently insatiable appetite for sexual innuendo, it tiresomely plays on any and every possible linguistic ambiguity - "He angles for fish but he loves flesh better," gives an idea.

Lisa Dillon as the hermaphroditic Moll is a bundle of dynamic nervous energy and good humour bursting with delight at her ability to shock and manipulate both her own shabby world and the frock-coated Establishment.

Her energy infects the large cast who carry the limping plot at a high octane level. Heavy rock interludes punctuate the series of cameo scenes in which audiences may at first struggle to work out who is who and which only occasionally hit the high comedy mark they aim for.

It's a play which lacks the dramatic coherence of last year's Middleton success A Mad World My Masters and its failings are, in the words of the epilogue, more to do with "the writers wit" than "negligence the actors commit."

Runs until September 30. Box office: (0844) 800-1116.

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