One of Samuel Pepys' most prodigious productions - quite apart from his definitive daily chronicle of Restoration life - was a bladder stone the size of a tennis ball hacked out in a surgical procedure involving neither anaesthesia nor antiseptic. Yet Pepys was proud of his stone, commissioning a special case for it, and showing it to visitors. Would that he were quite so solicitous towards his wife. Pepys married the pretty but penniless Elizabeth de St Michel when she was only 15, yet the higher Pepys' star ascended, the more Elizabeth came to be brushed off as a burden and an embarrassment. Their marital discord came to be minutely documented in the diary, most notably in the entry in which Mrs Pepys "coming upon me suddenly did find me imbracing the girl and endeed I was with my main in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it and the girl also."
It's a scene begging for farcical exploitation, and Vanessa Brooks dramatises it with relish, a flushed Pepys pulling away with the excuse: "Tis not so heavy a sin - 'tis a romp". Brooks suggests that Mrs Pepys had plenty of this to put up with. We see Elizabeth berating her husband for incessant whoring while refusing to give her a child; while in another encounter she discovers him with his head up his patroness's skirt.
Polly Frame's Mrs Pepys gives as good as she gets, but the difficulty is in understanding why such a spirited, self-sufficient woman - who separated from her husband for two years over a laundry dispute - should ever have consented to have him back.
· Until June 17. Box office: 01782 717962.
