When Caroline Quentin’s ageing Fanny Hill is first glimpsed, she is emerging from a shipping crate on the quayside. It neatly makes the point that in a cold, hard, bargaining world, sex is just a transaction and women’s bodies another commodity. But who pays the real price? It’s a question raised in April de Angelis’s clever, multilayered take on John Cleland’s 1748 publication, the first English pornographic novel.

De Angelis takes Cleland’s piece of engorged male wish-fulfilment, in which women are all just gagging for it, and reinvents it. This is a show that offers bawdy, bare-bottomed fun (including a memorable scene with a sock puppet), but which places the women centre stage as they try to take control over their own stories. It’s no surprise that Fanny, entering a bargain to write her memoirs with the manipulative Dingle (Nick Barber) who uses a debt to exert power over her, has almost no memory of her own history, because the real narratives of women like her are lost to history. As are those of so many ordinary women struggling to survive: Rosalind Steele’s musician Fiddle, who leads on Pete Flood’s terrific folksy score – never gets to tell her story.

The conceit is that Fanny must enlist the help of two other women, street walker Louisa (Phoebe Thomas) and young Swallow (Gwyneth Keyworth), a natural storyteller, to create her own biography, which they do. There is a lovely moment of exquisite tenderness when Swallow uses a coat to enact her love for Charles that must be excised from Fanny’s memoirs because it’s sex, not love, that sells.

Quentin is a wry delight using her comic deadpanning skills to ensure the show walks the tightrope between Carry On caper and something far darker. Keyworth is heartbreakingly good, and Michael Oakley’s knowing production encourages us to swallow this entertaining package with ease before making us choke on harsh reality.

• Until 7 March. Box office: 0117-987 7877. Venue: Bristol Old Vic.