IF YOU are going to take a moral tone, you might as well do so with a sense of fun.

Aristophanes did it with his anti-war comedy Lysistrata, and the Northern Broadsides company follow suit with Lisa’s Sex Strike, a sort of updating of the Greek classic.

Instead of Greek and Spartan women occupying the Acropolis, the women of the northern mill town of Blackhurst occupy the local components factory run by Prutt.

And, as with their predecessors, they withhold sexual favours from their menfolk, this time to halt ethnic fighting among them.

The result is the men get frustrated and there is an eventual end to war. But, in Blake Morrison’s script, the fight is also on to stop Prutt running his factory which has secretly been part of the arms race. That is resolved in a curious fashion using a spot of stage magic.

The 14-strong cast have a whale of a time with songs, suggestive gags and in the second half a descent into Chaucerian vulgarity with all the men wearing comedy erect phalluses.

There is even a Cabaret-styled number All You’ve Got to Do Is Whistle when the women finally get their way.

If the anti-war target is an easy one, there is no denying the sheer verve of the production directed by Conrad Nelson, with company founder Barry Rutter in great form as usual playing Mars, the God of War, in a Union Jack waistcoat.