The Fair Maid of the West

A ribald musical romp featuring a barmaid turned swashbuckling pirate, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Fair Maid of the West is the perfect holiday treat crammed full of laughs, dances and physical hijinks.

Adapted from Thomas Heywood’s Elizabethan drama, the play follows the adventures of Liz, a resilient rat-catcher and barmaid in a Plymouth pub. She is falsely accused of murder, flees to Cornwall, opens her own pub, and sails to Spain to recover the body of her lover.

Surrounding Liz are a teenage orphan, a postman full of grandiose stories, a swaggering bully, and a divorcee with a heart and voice of gold.