The World's Wife

Thanks to the GCSE English syllabus, I bear a grudge against Carol Ann Duffy. My enjoyment of poetry was set back a good few years by the experience of being a bored pupil in a bored class where a bored teacher gave a boring exegesis of the "key themes" in her work. As a result, I've never really given our new Poet Laureate much of a chance.

Happily, my opinion was changed by The World's Wife, a dramatisation of eighteen monologues from Duffy's collection of the same name, which tells the stories of historical and fictional figures from the perspective of their overlooked wives and partners.

There's not much verse at the Fringe, and it's easy to forget the power of poetry spoken aloud. Duffy's poems put this to rights, given voice by actress Linda Marlowe (equipped with the bare minimum of props: hornrimmed specs for Mrs Freud, a silk scarf for Salome). Marlowe is attuned to the poems' music, knowing which phrases to allow to ring out like bells with "generous bronze throats".

Occasionally Marlowe's interpretations can be a distraction; she becomes pantomimish when playing the hunchbacked, groaning wife of Quasimodo. Worse, her accents have a distracting tendency to wander: Queen Kong, Circe and Salome all veer between the midwestern and the antipodean.

But Marlowe's presence rarely detracts from the power of these poems, and sometimes she adds an extra dimension. In "The Devil's Wife", Duffy's imagining of Myra Hindley's motivation and guilt is all the more chilling with her subject represented in the flesh.