For her RSC directorial debut, Selina Cadell sets out to make her revival of William Congreve’s 1695 comedy feel at once contemporary and plausibly Restoration. Rosalind Ebbutt’s costumes retain the period coats and gowns whilst dispensing with the perukes and knee-breeches. Tom Piper’s set is simple, enabling the company to be seen rigging the stage while the audience enter. They also engage in direct banter with us (quite easy on an opening night with so many friends and colleagues in attendance). Rather than establishing a Brechtian alienation, however, in which we are distanced by our awareness that what we are watching is a play, this serves to merge actors and audience into a single community. The Swan’s deep thrust stage helps matters by militating against any natural fourth wall.

Consequently, the dafter aspects of the plot (which is to say most of it) are neither over-indulged nor mocked, but simply relished as among friends. It is standard Restoration fare: everybody is deceiving everybody else whilst amorously pursuing everybody else. Principally, Valentine Legend (now there’s a name for a pop idol!) and his beloved Angelica are each trying to outfox the other into declaring themselves, whilst his friends Scandal and Tattle learn valuable lessons of their own. Oh, and there’s a disputed inheritance in there as well, which Valentine’s selfish father Sir Sampson is trying to revoke..

At the performance I saw, when Ragevan Vasan as a miscellaneous manservant came on to set the stage after the interval, our teasing applause prompted him to go into a reprise of the hornpipe in which he had danced just before the break, then to bust ever more extreme moves before being bustled off. When Jonathan Broadbent as Tattle gabbled a line and had to take a second run at it, Justine Mitchell’s Angelica led the wry looks exchanged with the front rows.

The same playfulness pervades the staging proper: when Michael Thomas plants his body against a door in a free-standing frame to attempt to block the entry of Tom Turner’s Valentine, Turner simply walks round the side of the frame. Turner’s feigned madness at this stage in the proceedings is of a languid English kind, with a whiff of the late Vivian Stanshall. His manner in general makes him a plausible son of Sir Sampson as played by Nicholas Le Prevost with his mastery of self-puncturing suavity. It all bubbles along enjoyably, although after three hours it has delighted us enough.

Written for the Financial Times.