SILLY Cow is crude, clever and killingly funny, and it's coming to a theatre near you.

Newport Playgoers' latest offering is a first for the city. After playing to rave reviews in London with Dawn French in the leading role, it is sure to have audiences talking and is already creating quite a buzz in the city with lots of enquiries about tickets for the production which runs from April 19-24 at the Dolman Theatre.

This Ben Elton satire on the modern world is fast and slick and what is so clever about that is that fastness and slickness are what it satirises!

Doris Wallis, played by Deborah Morgan Lewis, is a venomous TV columnist who specialises in 'slagging off' celebrities and is, in her own words "a nasty cow who slaughters sacred cows".

Bitchy, brassy and bolshie, she is so poisonous that - as she tells her mousy secretary Peggy, played by Gillian Dale - "bogeymen get scared imagining me under their beds".

Egged on by her rough diamond colleague Sid, played by Jonathon Davies, advised by Douglas, her long-suffering accountant, played by Julian Powell, and titillated by her lithe toy-boy Eduardo, played by Lewis Cook, she is on the verge of a glorious venture into TV and she is not going to let anything get in her way - not even the "silly fat cow" who is currently suing her for libel.

Any skeletons in her cupboard are, like her bondage gear, firmly locked up - or so she thinks...

Directed by the experienced Rosemary Bissex, Silly Cow is a must for all addicts of 'Blackadder' and 'The Thin Blue Line'.

But there is a health warning. "Little House on the Prairie it's not," said Rosemary. "The language which accompanies the somewhat tricky topics is most definitely 21st century - and not a euphamism to be found!"

This cracker of a play with its devious twists and turns is strictly for the over 18s and the under 90s.

Drinks will be available during the interval. Performances start at 7.15pm except Friday when curtain up is at 7.30pm. Tickets are available from the Visitors' Centre in Newport Library, John Frost Square, or from the box office at the theatre in Kingsway on the night.