It sounded such a swashbucklingly delicious prospect. In Bryony Lavery’s new play, we were promised, the devil-may-care adventuress and highwaywoman Lady Barbara, heroine of Magdalen King-Hall’s novel and the much better-known 1945 movie starring Margaret Lockwood, would ride again in spectacular fashion. Endowed with an ample sense of fun, Lavery’s text tempers bodice-ripper broadness with a feminist sensibility. But Theresa Heskins’s production is too diffuse, managing neither the romantic dash nor the gender-political punch that the writing demands.

Lavery’s Barbara, played with sardonic humour and energy but insufficient heat by Róisín Gallagher, like a girl in a fairytale is bereft of her mother and, despite her rebellious transgressions, never succeeds in freeing herself from male control. She is propelled by her father into a profitable but sterile marriage; driven to recklessness by boredom and misery, she dons boots and breeches and turns to crime, yet is quickly subjugated by a fellow robber, Jerry Jackson, who demands her professional and sexual obedience and then betrays her. Finally, her secret, cross-dressing double life is discovered by a sanctimonious servant, Hogarth, who like his famous namesake has a sharp eye for immorality (William Hogarth’s illustrative works include depictions of both mercenary marriages and a highwayman hanged at Tyburn). Hogarth also tries to blackmail Barbara into penitence. In attempting to escape her stultifying existence she has built her own cage.

Heskins has the in-the-round stage abustle with multitasking actors swapping wigs, robes and roles and supplying a rural and domestic soundscape: twittering birds, jingling carriage harnesses, barking dogs, ticking clocks. The approach is appealingly inventive, but its execution is ragged. And aerial sequences, in which Barbara mounts a saddle and is hoisted up above Liz Cooke’s moonlit set, are anticlimactic. There’s little sensuality or excitement here, just an actor dangling from a wire. Similarly, a bed scene between Gallagher and Marcello Walton’s somewhat shouty Jerry, when the pair entwine suspended in red silk ropes, is curiously studied and unerotic, the storytelling impeded by technical demands.

The narrative itself retains a highly coloured exuberance, but it needs far more cocksure gusto and twinkling wit. Those qualities occasionally emerge; more often they are dissipated by a production that is unfocused and untidy.

Box office: 01782 717962, to July 25

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