DOING it outdoors is not always fun. Spare a thought for Liz Humphry-Williams.
On the hottest of Sunday afternoons in this July heatwave, she has to wear 12 layers in the cause of theatre in The Fortunes & Misfortunes of the Infamous Moll Flanders.
Her misfortune is our fortune because this Moll flowers rather than flounders, as Daniel Defoe's heavyweight tome from 1772 is re-told with gaiety by Nobby Dimon and his travelling Richmond players.
For all the social commentary of the book, Moll has become as much a symbol of the busty British brand of bawdiness as Chaucer's Wife Of Bath or Barbara Windsor in the Carry On films, and it is this romping spirit that Dimon and his North Country Theatre cast clasp to Moll's ample bosom.
Moll's life follows a circular path from Newgate Gaol and back there again via multiple marriages, whoring and theft, and Dimon's fast-moving merry-go-round of a show mirrors that progression throughout, with actors entering on one side and exiting from the other.
In the middle is, what else? but a revolving four-poster bed.
With typical NTC invention that bed becomes a ship for a Titanic love scene pastiche and a coach and horses for a Dick Turpin robbery.
Throughout Dimon, Humphry-Williams, Susan Louise Jinks's saucy and resourceful Moll, Mark Cronfield, Thomas Frere and Kathy Osborne gallivant to joyful comic gain.
Catch Moll at Knaresborough Castle, tomorrow, 7.30pm.
Updated: 12:05 Wednesday, July 16, 2003
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