Les Smith's adaptation of Moll Flanders, with folksy original music by John O'Hara, is a Hogarthian progress you can hum along to; a suite of tableaux from the dark side of the 18th century whose narrative flows like an open sewer.
The episodic business of picaresque fiction makes for a good read, or a great television serial, but rarely successful theatre: where the action either flits between a clutch of barely developed characters, or chokes itself in coils of undramatic literalism. Smith solves these problems by transfroming his heroine into a woman with so much emotional baggage it takes a trio of actresses to shoulder the load.
That 50% of the cast are playing the heroine sounds like a recipe for confusion. But the combined efforts of Maeve Larkin, Olwen May and Nora Connolly provide an excellent study in scarlet womanhood. With each actress exploiting her individuality, rather than attempting to resemble each other, Moll becomes a general condition rather than a person - a poignant summary of the choices, or lack of them, open to a woman born in Newgate and destined to return.
Ian Hasting's inventive production proves that you can have cut-price costume drama without cutting corners. Economies are turned to advantage. As the versatile Patrick Bridgman marries Moll several times over the course of the evening, one perceives in this succession of inappropriate husbands a woman fated to make the same mistake over and over again.
Equally illuminating is the cast's ability to busk their own accompaniment; they create a sense of life spontaneously interpreted as a broadside ballad-opera. Terry Brown's wooden scaffold set suggests an existence played out within the shadow of the gallows. An intoxicating musical detour down Gin Lane.
Until Saturday. Box office: 0161-236 7110. Then tours to Lancaster and Bristol.