As a kind of subplot to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current long-term complete-works project, deputy artistic director Erica Whyman is overseeing a quartet of productions of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries which focus on women. The Roaring Girls season takes its name from Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s Jacobean comedy (of 1610 or thereabouts) centred on Moll Cutpurse… less the historical figure born Mary Frith than the legend which persisted even after she apparently recanted her sins of general roistering and, gasp, dressing in male apparel. Yet the Moll of the play is also virtuous after her fashion: she swaggers and mocks, but resists several opportunities for theft and signs on to help young Sebastian marry his beloved by herself posing as the (to Sebastian’s father) even less palatable alternative.

This is a “city comedy”, with several plot strands on the go simultaneously; most of the others are in effect the same plot, of a city wife receiving the blandishments of one of Sebastian’s young-gallant friends and eventually seeing through him. These plays are generally rumbustious affairs, and director Jo Davies busts the rum by punctuating her production with bouncily blaring 2-Tone-meets-Berlin-kabarett music from an all-female quartet driven by the nimble bass guitar work of Sarah Rose Higgins. However, Davies principally dresses affairs in a Victorian style, consequently suggesting that that age was one less of prudery than of furtive curiosity. Men repeatedly make remarks that dressing a woman in breeches acts as a spur to desire, and Moll herself seems sexually ambiguous. Lisa Dillon makes a most successful “drag king”, with short quiff, tattoos and oodles of braggadocio. Her performance is a matter not of impersonation – pretending to be something Moll isn’t – but of personification – giving form to something more intangible that she is.

For the rest, matters are at their best when at their most frantic, which by and large means after the interval, in the crisis/resolution phase. Tony Jayawardena is a treat as Openwork the tailor, one of the cuckold-to-be husbands, and Geoffrey Freshwater as all-purpose ne’er-do-well Ralph Trapdoor is only missing a parrot on his shoulder. Hardly a neglected masterpiece, then, but one of a number of small gems from the period that we too often overlook outside of postgraduate literary studies.
    
Written for the Financial Times.