FIRST the talk was of pantomime dame Berwick Kaler playing his first "straight" role at the York Theatre Royal since Trumpets And Raspberries 20 years ago.

Then there were his stomach pains, brought on by his spaniel's death, that forced his admission to hospital after only one performance.

On Monday, Kaler returned to his role - temporarily filled by director Gregory Floy last week - and last night he was hitting his stride as Henry Horatio Hobson, the boozy, bumptious Salford shoe shop owner, brought to heel by his forthright and forceful eldest daughter, Maggie (Emma Gregory).

His accent is yet to catch up with him, still held up in the cross-Pennine congestion on the M62, but the northern rhythm of speech and booming rasp to his voice are the stuff of Hobson. Any stiffness will soon be knocked out of performance and slightly ill-fitting grey suit alike.

Guest director Floy's production of Harold Brighouse's feisty Lancashire comedy - written in 1915 and set in Victorian industrial 1880 - is pulled in several directions. On the one hand, Kaler's strand is the King Lear of the North, provoking his three daughters to rebel against his tyrannical decision making, and Kaler plays him in broad style with rolling eyes, pathos aplenty and customary comic timing that at one point elicits spontaneous applause.

It is, of course, difficult to jettison all thoughts of his pantomimes, and when Hobson complains of a "gradual increase in uppishness towards me", the audience laughter may in part be in response to Kaler's perennial dame being subjected to just such a regime by Leonard, Barrass and Co each winter.

As much as it is a comic variation on Lear, Hobson's Choice is also a female, indeed feminist answer to Pygmalion. Plain-speaking, plain-dressing Maggie, and not Hobson, is the story's hub, and she transforms not only simple shoesmith Willie Mossop (David Shelley) into her business-minded husband but her father too.

Emma Gregory, who has worked regularly with Floy, uses a straighter style than Kaler to good effect in its own right, but sometimes it feels like two productions in one.

Shelley's Mossop quietly comes through on the rails, and Robert Pickavance's prickly Scottish doctor is a gem of a late cameo.

However, French designer Lili Rogu's bird-cage set is a little too fancy Dan, yet more competition for attention in the house of Hobson.

Updated: 10:31 Thursday, April 07, 2005