When the roving hands of Lesley Manville's middle-aged Lady Celia Cane and a cockney seamstress called Eve (Jemima Rooper) collide in a watery pail of potatoes in Holloway prison's kitchen, their eyes meet too. It's the Naked Skin moment of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's intriguing, poignant play about the Edwardian suffragette movement, the women caught up in love and politics, and the damage they caused themselves by their selfsacrificial bravery and obstinacy: when Miss Rooper's heart-rending Eve is subjected to force-feeding, with the revolting, risky process acted out in meticulous detail by guards,wardress, doctors and nurse, it looks to contemporary eyes nothing less than torture of a kind that could and often did precipitate death by infection.

Miss Lenkiewicz's ingenious idea is to portray the cross-class, lesbian affair that breaks out over those potatoes, between married Celia and Miss Rooper's memorably smitten, vulnerable Eve, as a microcosm of the feminists' campaign to defy the rules of society. In charting the rise and not very well explained fall of the romance, its symptoms confined to perfunctory kissing and hands under skirts in parkland together with a brief bedroom scene, the author skates over the fact of Celia's five children.

She does highlight the problems of discovering yourself a sexual outsider in middle-age and of crossing the classdivide. Manville's cool, poised Celia invites little sympathy when facing up to her unloved, despised husband, whose anguish is powerfully registered by Adrian Rawlins. Unfortunately concentration upon the women's turbulent relationship means the vital, political aspects are glossed over.

Despite its fluffy grasp of the politics of 1914 Her Naked Skin does offer a vivid impression of Edwardian society in embattled crisis. Rob Howell's set is dominated by two tiers of prison cages, emblems of a society trying to put a tight hold on freedom and women regarded as captives in gaol or out of it. The bleakly humorous Holloway scenes are absolutely superb, suggesting the infinite ways in which the suffragettes were harassed and humiliated by dumb authority: the hosing down of Susan Engel's upper-crust protester particularly repellent. Initially the play tingles with political vitality in Howard Davies's epic, musically atmospheric production. Filmed images of Emily Davison throwing herself in front of a racing horse give way to scenes of the suffragettes in action - breaking Regent Street windows, having their Hyde Park meeting broken up by men, caught up in shooting practice in Epsom Forest. Asquith's Liberal administration, caricatured as buffoons which they were not, withers the suffragette's pillar of parliamentary support - Robert Willox's impassioned Keir Hardie - with languid, lordly contempt.

Susan Engel, in tremendous, witty form as Florence Boorman, the elderly, unmarried suffragette leader, offers haughty, triumphant antidotes to official agents of authority. Asked by Holloway's doctor what she thought of women who had whipped one of his colleagues she retorts "I hope he paid them the going rate." Miss Manville's taut, tense Celia finally emerges from conflicts over politics and sex, Her Naked Skin's big loser, having failed to pin her colours to any mast.