Fibs and a touch of lust

THE HERBAL BED

(Lowry, Salford, to Saturday)

Peter Whelan’s play is in its way a sort of anti-Crucible.

Arthur Miller wrote about honourable people who faced a terrible fate for telling the truth, but told it anyway. Whelan writes about people who tell lies and get away with it — and not just any people, but the daughter of William Shakespeare.

Well, maybe. All Whelan had to refer to was an ecclesiastical court report that said Susannah Hall, wife of local Stratford doctor John Hall, won a slander case against Jack Lane in 1613. The rest is pretty much all Whelan.

Hall (Jonathan Guy Lewis) is more interested in his medical books and famous herbal potions — mixed from the specimens grown in his delightfully-realised (designer Jonathan Fensom) herb garden — than in his wife Susannah (Emma Lowndes).

When she takes up briefly with local tradesman Rafe Smith (Philip Correia), she is spotted by her maid Hester (Charlotte Fletcher) and Jack-the-lad Lane, who is more interested in drinking than the doctor’s tuition, and has been dismissed as Hall’s apprentice.

In frustration Jack claims to have seen Rafe and Susannah making out, and that she has gonorrhoea.

The first is a “just about”, the second untrue. Attempts to settle the matter fail and the case ends up in front of the local church court, where even after the case is won, the judge fancies himself as a prototype hanging judge and carries on interrogating.

English Touring Theatre’s production, by James Dacre, is beautifully put together with authentic costumes and a beautiful little herb garden, but the play itself is handled in a rather slight way.

Though characters make revelations and get angry, there is little sense of great emotional or partnership danger - and even more oddly, the central female character is the elderly Shakespeare’s daughter — a snippet made much of in the advance material for the show but in fact almost irrelevant to the plot.

Though nicely acted and cleverly put together, this herbal bed is a bit too neat and well-kept to ever get your green fingers working.