For the best part of 20 years, Barrie Rutter has led a barn-storming crusade against the deadening complacency of velvet theatre. Yet his latest project features something I never thought I'd see in a Northern Broadsides production - a chaise longue centre stage. Whisper it, but could Rutter's company be going soft?
Well, perhaps not yet - the first action of Sara Poyzer's Lady Sneerwell is to hoik up her gown and prodigiously fill a chamber pot, which seems to indicate that it's business as usual. A spot of rough handling does the play no disservice at all - there's none of the effete, flapping manner usually inflicted on Sheridan, and though there's a certain amount of primping and preening as occasion demands, it is clear that Rutter is less interested in the paint and powder of 18th-century England than with the filth beneath its fingernails.
The jarring colours and clashing energies of Rutter's production resemble a Gillray cartoon sprung to life, though the play's setting among London's sneering classes means that one or two incongruities appear. Sally Carman's Lady Teazle is a bumptious country wench inelegantly flaunting her ascension to the metropolitan beau monde, though the effect is slightly diminished when all the accents originate a long way north of Walthamstow. Yet Carman's obstreperous disregard of her elderly husband (rather stolidly played by Rutter himself) is a joy to behold, and her determination to stay abreast of the fashions by wearing all of them at once is quintessential Georgian chav.
Above all, the rough spit and polish of Northern Broadsides' approach reminds you that Sheridan was an outsider himself, as cynical and discomforted by English society as he was assimilated into it. Northern Broadsides unleash an unbuttoned vigour that brings out Sheridan's reprobate side. Who would have thought that the old cloggers would find satin breeches so becoming?
· Until September 17. Box office: 01422 255266. Then touring.
