The World's Wife at the Maidment Theatre

By PETER CALDER

The theatre's enduring appeal resides in the fact that it is live, in the sense that nothing interposes between performer and audience. So it is hard to understand the decision to clip on microphones to the three actors in this otherwise excellent production.

The disjunction between sight and sound - the speaker stands before us but her voice is above us - is distressing and distracting and getting used to it takes some time, not least because the sound is so uneven.

Perhaps it is a decision driven by the need to make the voices heard. But Don McGlashan's music - stylish though it is - never earns the right to dominate proceedings.

The piece is its words, after all, and it is a tribute to the brilliance of the poetry and the artistry of its delivery that the production survives - indeed soars above - this singular handicap.

It consists of solo dramatised recitations of poems from British poet Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 collection, which gives fanciful voice to the wives of the famous from history, literature and mythology.

The poems are quite beyond praise, acts of exultation in the power of language, each as accessible as gossip but threaded with seams of meaning.

Deliciously funny, vigorously sexy, they are also inflected with a profound sense of pain and longing and have enough gravitas to allow lines such as "behind our lullabies, the hooves of terrible horses thunder and drum" to land with real dramatic force.

There are eye-wateringly hilarious interludes: Mrs Icarus is a Glaswegian of few words; Mrs Aesop fumes about her husband (a North Country know-all who "could bore for purgatory"). Elsewhere, sequences such as the Devil's Wife, which re-animates Moors murderer Myra Hindley, achieve a heartstopping potency.

But mostly their effect is subtle rather than punchy. Mrs Midas laments the loss of "his warm hands on my skin, his touch", and a piece which spins off Shakespeare's legacy to Anne Hathaway is a perfect - and perfectly carnal - love poem.

The trio of actors serve the work superbly. On Andrew Thomas' clever scroll-like set they bring the words to life with spare and telling pieces of stagecraft - a pile of stones, say, or a woman, motionless and longing at a window.

Fiona Samuel, who devised the show and has the lioness' share of the parts, stands out for her extraordinary range and command of tone. Flipping between coquettish, bereft and diabolical with fluid ease, she has us in her thrall.

But Rachel House and Elizabeth McRae are more than equal to their assignments: McRae's Mrs Faust and House's Queen Kong are standouts.

In all it is 90 minutes of almost unadulterated theatrical pleasure. If they turned the mikes off and the music down, it would be absolutely perfect.