The Roaring Girl

Production Notes

The Dekker-Middleton canon was littleknown in the 1980s, least of all The “The Roaring Girl”, and theatre reviews were positive and sympathetic. Comparing the play’s attitude towards sex and wealth with that of the day, Don Chapman wrote in the Oxford Mail that Mirren’s Moll was “a feminist Robin Hood preaching equality of the sexes and an end topoverty and corruption”. She “vindicated women’s right to smoke and proves female superiority again and again”. Some critics were impressed by Kyle’s vision in staging this “marvellous pageant of colour and excitement” and the “smell and feel” of seventeenth-century London. Terry Grimley in the Birmingham Post applauded the production’s “care and lavishness”, with Kyle unearthing an unknown London – a “malodorous haunt of harlots, hoodlums, men-about-town, con men, downtrodden”. Although Michael Billington found the play “no masterpiece”, he wrote in the Guardian that the success of Kyle’s production lies partly in its centralcasting and partly in its ability to evoke the teeming variety of Jacobean London. And he concluded that this “enjoyable revival… vindicates Kyle’s one-man campaign toexplore the byways as well as the highwaysof English drama”.