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.