Made in Dagenham review - the feast of the show is visual rather than aural Who would have predicted this during the Lloyd Webber era? In the West End this autumn, three shows have sung with brio about trade union battles. Richard Eyre's production of The Pajama Game was until recently sizzling at the Shaftesbury, Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot is still pirouetting at the Victoria Palace. And now at the Adelphi, Rupert Goold, the director who has put the punch back into the Almeida, reimagines the 2010 movie Made in Dagenham, the story of the Ford female machinists whose 1968 strike paved the way for legislation on equal pay. This at a time when the Labour party can barely say the U-word without going pink. Who would want to resist a show that delivers a strong feminist message with raunchiness and a scarlet Biba minidress? The evening ends with the heroine, a reluctant activist who has put her marriage in jeopardy for her colleagues, addressing the TUC conference and calling for her listeners to stand up for the women workers. I nearly did get on my pins. But not quite, and not only because of the absurd convention that requires critics to button up their reactions on press night. Made in Dagenham is a show bursting with varied talent. Richard Thomas, creator of Jerry Springer - the Opera, provides some spicy lyrics. Richard Bean, the fluent dramatist of the workplace who is now most famous for One Man, Two Guvnors, supplies a script so gag-packed that it sometimes chokes on its own jokes. Yet the gusto comes and goes. It needs one more run along the assembly line to come tightly together. There is no question about Gemma Arterton as the star. If anything, she is more impressive on stage than on screen. Understatement is the currency of film; in the theatre her naturalness is a knockout attribute. She conjures up, without imitating, Sandie Shaw, who worked as a punch-card operator at Dagenham, and who won the Eurovision song contest a year before the strike. Arterton has Shaw's light voice, shrugging charm - and hair. Above all, she has the same graceful lope. It is as if she has simply sauntered on to a stage which she holds with complete assurance. There are powerful voices among the female workers. Sophie Isaacs, got up like Barbara Windsor in bunches and a tight bodice, has a bellow like Lulu. Sophie-Louise Dann belts it out as Barbara Castle in a C&A dress. She has a hard act to follow in Miranda Richardson, who so slinkily characterised the minister (celebrated for her dancing) in the movie, and she overdoes the abrasiveness. In doing so she echoes the casual sexism that formed the backdrop to the Dagenham dispute, which Bean catches very well: Castle is routinely introduced as "fiery - like her hair." The feast of the show is visual rather than aural. Bunny Christie's designs for set and costumes are fab. The typography is floral. The factory is like an Airfix model, with ghostly grey car seats revolving above the heads of the workers. Our heroine has an all-over orange and brown daisy print bedspread, while pegged to the washing line (not, I am sure, by a manly hand) is a trim pair of tangerine Y-fronts. The outfits are in equal measure swinging and very dodgy: tiny fawn trenchcoats, a striped shift dress with buttons up to the neck; shiny knee-high boots. In one of the most gorgeously garish episodes a Cortina ad features a woman flashing her thighs, clawing the air and yammering nonsense. Delivering the words is a man wearing a purple velvet suit tightly buttoned over a white polo-neck sweater. Here and elsewhere the joyful clamour of Goold's production is sped along by Aletta Collins's choreography. The "Viva Eastbourne" number has Harold Wilson, who also does a silly-walk sequence with his civil servants, spinning around the stage in a dodgem car. There is a particularly welcome bottom-bumping line-up of boiler-suited male workers. David Arnold's music is a skilful pastiche of 1960s pop and rock; the mounting cadences of the Beatles are especially well caught. It does not deliver one big ear-worming number - though the "Stand Up" chant comes close - and it cannot compete musically with Sunny Afternoon, the Kinks musical which is also making the 1960s whoop through the West End (unions don't come so well out of that show). There is a practical problem with the hyper-lively script. Audiences warm to the idea of the 60s but only some of them recognise the personnel. Some of Bean's jokes either don't land or over-egg a visual pudding. When Harold Wilson comes on in his mac and makes a joke about Gannex, half the spectators have seen the point, while the rest don't know what he is wittering about. "Is it a true story?" one young woman asked her friend on the way out. Well, true in parts.