Frankie goes to Market

With all the flair and razzle dazzle of an American director injecting the elixir of life into a limp Broadway musical, Rufus Norris manages to bolster David Eldridge's dramatically inert though sporadically amusing comedy of Romford market traders.

Norris's production, with the nostalgic, Eighties sounds of anything from Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Spandau Ballet and Wham!, not to mention Elgar and Samuel Barber played to satirical effect, seethes with spectacular stage craft and craftiness.

Eldridge's idea of making those raucous, lippy traders a microcosm of Margaret Thatcher's England is more surprising than Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.

That novel, as adapted for television this month, revelled in Thatcherism rampant, viewed through the perspective of a gay, coke-taking graduate, who was snugly lodged in the Notting Hill Gate home of a rich, upwardlythrusting Tory MP and his family.

Yet while Hollinghurst organised a subtle, stinging assault upon the nasty, acquisitive spirit of the Thatcher years and its impact on some of us, Eldridge's knockabout, comic-strip view of Thatcher and the market boys who think her hot political stuff makes only crude, caricature points.

Norris has realised Eldridge's 123-page play text, which has been work in laborious progress since 2002, requires strong pruning and emergency mulching for the production to flower.

So he resorts to shock tactics that make the stage intermittently exciting. Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood strikes up its dreamy notes.

A real turquoise van bursts through a back-cloth poster that warns Labour is not working.

A huge scaffolding frame trundles round on the revolving stage.

Young traders scamper and swing along this scaffolding like athletic, performing monkeys.

'Packing Out' begins in a rush, which means boxes of shoes are stacked on a freshly-created stall.

Danny Worters's shy 13-year-old Boy of the title is introduced to the tricks of the market trade as several varieties of Romford woman are sexually flattered and seduced into trying on shoes.

All human life is here, or almost.

Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair could well be Eldridge's model.

A cast of 30, playing caricature types, from Romford's most beautiful woman to a transvestite chap, a "knicker woman" and Margaret Thatcher herself, are caught up in the bartering throng.

Nicola Blackwell's slightly farcical Conservative PM, who wears hair that looks as if standing to respectful attention, appears amid the traders who wear Union Jack costumes.