Hello, girls - it's hen night in Hull. Ron Rose's comedy about a ladies' darts team is not the subtlest play ever written, but it's one of the sauciest. At one point a police constable comes in and strips down to his helmet: you get the picture. Robert Hudson, the lone male member of the cast, should get an Olivier for this, or at the very least a Duke of Edinburgh award for bravery.
Hull Truck's artistic director, John Godber, has discovered the knack of plugging the gaps between his prodigious output with writers whose work is virtually indistinguishable from his own. Ron Rose has been reclaimed from a journeyman career in TV-writing (his name rolls up regularly on credits for The Bill) and has provided a Godberian piece with all the classic Hull Truck attributes of sport, sweat and a good deal of swearing.
Still, it's interesting to see women behaving badly for a change - there hasn't been this much steaming oestrogen on stage since Godber and Jane Thornton's cocktail-waitress play, Shakers. And, as Godber's forthcoming drama threatens to delve into the fetid world of long-distance lorry drivers, Rose's play seems positively fragrant.
For all the ebullience and accessibility, there is actually a poetic snap and mastery of structure within Godber's work that is harder to emulate. Rose's plot labours where Godber's would sprint. He introduces heavy emotional issues as ballast to the hormonal high-jinks, but never entirely fuses them.
Rose does, however, write great parts for forty-something women, and the four actresses here have a ball. Martine Brown, Michelle Butt and Juliet Prew form a hearty gang of sisters doing it for themselves, though Julie Higginson has the plum role of a single mother who loses her teenage daughter to drugs. Her second-act monologue is a harrowing recital of every parent's worst nightmare, which would be even better if it belonged with the rest of the play. But it is as eloquent an example of Rose's rage as you will find here.
· Until July 27. Box office: 01482 323638.
