It is not often that you can compliment a piece of work by claiming that it really stinks, but Northern Stage and Kneehigh Theatre's joint production is rank with the feral odours that permeate Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays. "No smell," declares Schigolch, Lulu's father, as he contemptuously sniffs one of her suitors on the assumption anyone acquainted with a hot bath cannot possibly be good enough for his daughter. Mike Shepherd's verminous Schigolch informs us that he washes daily in his own spit. When he scratches his head, he disturbs a spray of scalp-flakes that dance in the air before resettling under his rancid hat.
The Lulu plays are a theatrical itch that generations of practitioners have felt compelled to scratch. Kneehigh and Northern Stage have neither a femme fatale in the beauty-league of recent London Lulus Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and Anna Friel, nor a score to compare with Alban Berg's opera. What they do have in Emma Rice is a kind of anti-Lulu - almost the precise opposite of the composite male fantasy one has come to expect. "Men's lives have been shorter than those legs," one of the characters drools - in which case the average life expectancy of Lulu's lovers is reduced still further, Rice being on the short side.
Her gutsy characterisation is like replacing a glittering Gustav Klimt model with a scowling Egon Schiele hooker and works very well indeed. Rice radiates power, seeming far more predator than victim; the fact that she co-directs alongside Neil Murray may also account for the sense that she is in control.
The ensemble style isn't wholly convincing - there is a great deal of generalised prowling about and a lot of unmotivated swaying. But there's much in this scabrous take on the Lulu plays to make you open your mind and hold your nose.
· Until April 6 (0191-230 5151), then touring to Bracknell, Salisbury and Leeds.
