THOMAS Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness forms the lesser-known half of an Elizabethan double bill with Shakespeare's Henry V on Northern Broadsides' tour.

Two plays that go to the heart, these companion pieces both involve a battlefield; in Henry's case the French fields of Agincourt; in 'Kindness', the combat zone is a bed in Yorkshire in a study of domestic strife.

Should you be looking to make a choice between the two, go for the Heywood play, and not merely because it makes reference to the York Castle jail and flying hawks on Knavesmire! Henry V comes around as often as a carousel ride (Adrian Lester's khaki-clad, commanding Henry has just opened at the National Theatre).

'Kindness', by comparison, has pretty much gone AWOL since the National's 1971 performance featuring "a callow youth who has since grown into Sir Derek Jacobi in a scene-stealing performance of a sulky adolescent".

On the same plain, simple, circular wooden set design by Giuseppe Belli and Emma Barrington-Binns that features in Henry V, with its bear-pit overtones, Broadsides director Barrie Rutter gives an Edwardian setting to Heywood's drama. All tweed suits and dandy waistcoats, to go with the live music and traditional folk dancing in clogs that have become cornerstones of the Broadsides theatrical experience.

The plot is as simple as the design in a play with northern clout. In two intertwined plots, four men of different humours - melancholy, phlegmatic, bloody and choleric - and two women, one the newly married perfect bride, the other the gift-showered subject of unwanted infatuation, are drawn into a maddening maelstrom.

All it takes, in keeping with that principle of the beating of a butterfly's wing having a knock-on effect, is one rash act in each plot to set in motion a series of reactions that lead to recrimination and self sacrifice.

The choleric Acton (Paul Barnhill) overheats in the presence of both the bloody Mountford (Andrew Vincent) and his stoical sister, Susan (Nicola Sanderson), while the phlegmatic response of John Frankford (the outstanding Richard Standing) to the adultery of his delicately beautiful wife Anne (Maeve Larkin) with the melancholic, guilt-ridden Wendoll (John Gully) results only in heightened, tender tragedy.

As with their cracking production of The Cracked Pot, Northern Broadsides are to be thanked for bringing a deserving work back to the front-line, and on the evidence of Broadsides' moving, witty and direct piece of Renaissance theatre it is baffling why 'Kindness' tends to sit in a dark corner gathering dust.

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Updated: 11:48 Thursday, May 22, 2003