Lady Barbara Skelton, the notorious star of Magdalen King-Hall's novel, should steal the show at Newcastle-under-Lyme's New Vic this summer
Full equality of the sexes, if it comes, will have to include equality at being bad. Bryony Lavery laughed when I asked her about feminism and The Wicked Lady, her adaptation of Magdalen King-Hall's 1943 novel, The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton, which opens at the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme on 3 July.
"True feminists don't think women are perfect," Lavery said. Lady Barbara Skelton is some way short of perfect: she became so famous in a 1945 film version of King-Hall's novel that its star, Margaret Lockwood, was frequently known as the "wicked lady" ever after. (A veil is generally drawn over the 1983 remake by Michael Winner, which starred Faye Dunaway.) Skelton is a woman who makes a bad marriage for money very young, in Charles II's England. When she is cheated at poker, she takes up highway robbery and finds that she not only enjoys it but is also terribly good at it.
Lavery makes it clear that she has adapted the book – "not a classic of English literature," she admits – rather than the film. "We can't condone her," says Lavery, "and this is a theatrical adventure, not an indictment of social conditions in the 17th century."
One of our busiest theatre writers, Lavery earned her reputation early with the theatre company Female Trouble and as artistic director of Gay Sweatshop. Her extraordinary dramatisation of Beatrix Campbell's Goliath (about the riots that set so many city estates alight in 1991) was followed by the award-winning Frozen, which focused on the issue of whether child murder can ever be forgiven. She's used to the assumption that her work is invariably heavyweight as well as feminist.
The Wicked Lady promises something slightly different. Although the New Vic is in the round and has no fly tower, the show features a spectacular aerial display. Swashbuckling horseback fights will be played out by actors suspended in harnesses.
• So now we know – Lenny Henry has definitely encouraged new audiences for Shakespeare. His Othello for Northern Broadsides brought 22,000 people to West Yorkshire Playhouse when it opened, helping the Leeds theatre to a season increase in bookings of 17% and an impressive 38% new attenders.
• Torrential rain completely knocked out Sheffield Theatres' box office last week, but the show in the Lyceum – the superb Sadler's Wells West Side Story – naturally went on. Coming soon: Singin' in the Rain (July) and Rain Man (September). In the city where some people have just got their homes straight after the floods of two years ago, nobody's laughing.
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