Daniel Defoe’s picaresque tale of a woman’s travails in a world ruled by money and peopled by whores, cutpurses and fortune hunters is enduringly colourful. Perhaps that’s why in this version, adapted and choreographed by Peter Machen and directed by Rebekah Fortune, most of the creative energy appears to have been absorbed by lurid visuals.

The staging is crammed with smoke-wreathed, contorted tableaux of gurning figures straining to create an impression of grotesque Hogarthian excess. The actors’ faces are made up ghastly white; the women’s cheeks are lividly rouged, their mouths pinched scarlet cupid’s bows, and there’s so much brittle, brutally teased and hairsprayed coiffure on show that if anyone lit a match half the cast would go up like Roman candles.

But if the styling, by Victoria Czifra-Walwyn, initially makes a strong impression, it can’t compensate for a production in which the narrative is so clumsily compressed and the characters so ill-defined that the story never engages. Machen’s movement relies on some pretty hackneyed physical theatre devices.

Characters frozen into attitudes crudely suggestive of urban streetlife stand, stock-still and pointless, at one end of the performance space for large chunks of the action. Sometimes they act as storytellers, intoning plot details in a ragged and monotonous chorus. The role of Moll herself, meanwhile, is shared between three actresses – though the thinking behind this is unclear, since each of the trio makes equally bland work of Defoe’s fascinatingly flawed heroine.

The device could have been employed to explore the tension between the virgin/ mother/whore trinity of feminine archetypes, but Fortune and Machen squander the opportunity by failing to probe the politics beneath the tale’s teeming incident. Nor do they make much of the theme of the tyranny of capitalism, under which the worth of an individual is weighed in pounds, shillings and pence – an idea that, in Britain’s current climate of financial instability, could have had a particularly searing relevance. Instead, this is all flounce and posturing, rarely allowing us a glimpse of the suffering, striving humanity beneath the mask of powder and paint.

Box office: 0844 8471656, to Aug 30 2008

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