Theatre reviews: The Riot

The Riot

National Theatre, Cottesloe, London SE1 (0171-452 3000)

With an elderly mother played as a bombasined drag act, mock-deaths staged with the aid of tomato chutney and an 11th-hour reprieve for capitalism as it stands with a noose round its neck, could certainly be said to subscribe to the cock-up theory of history. The bracingly irreverent Kneehigh Theatre company restages this startling episode of Cornwall's past - the local uprising of 1899 - as buoyant, bloody farce with tremendous skill, putting an exuberant bomb under pompous parochialism.