In the RSC gift shop in Stratford-upon-Avon you can buy a Shakespearean Insult Generator kit, but old Bill was as nothing compared to his near-contemporary Ben Jonson. He is all too seldom staged these days, because his language refuses to be tamed. It can be dense, classical, or inventively vulgar... sometimes all at once, as when one of the conspirators here remarks of his partner working on one of their con victims, “She must milk his epidydimis.” It’s virtually incomprehensible (the epidydimis is part of the male genital plumbing), but sounds flamboyantly filthy and so gets the job done with verve.

The master of a London townhouse has fled to avoid the plague; his butler has invited in a fraudulent alchemist and a whore, and together they gull a succession of victims ranging from a foolish but ambitious tradesman seeking a kind of Jacobean feng shui reading to an epicurean nobleman (named, in fact, Sir Epicure Mammon) and a cult of religious dissenters who alike seek the limitless wealth of the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s basically an excuse for a series of quick-change comic turns, interwoven at ever-increasing pace as with the best classic farces, until – also farcically – everything unravels at once.

The oddest thing about Polly Findlay’s revival is that it is not ostentatiously frenzied. Ken Nwosu as Face the butler, Mark Lockyer as Subtle the grouchy alchemist and Siobhan McSweeney as Dol Common work with the comparative calm and certainly the assurance of practised bunco artists. (Corin Buckeridge’s score tips us the wink with an overture of assorted movie themes including that of The Sting.) They can even improvise arguments that are almost as vicious as their real ones.

Nevertheless, without appearing to, the pace and intensity gradually build, stoked by the likes of Ian Redford’s hymns to excess as Mammon and Tom McCall, who manages to be at once languid and turbulent as a young man who wants to learn how to be fashionably quarrelsome. And you can’t say the RSC aren’t getting their money’s worth out of that life-size plaster crocodile hanging from the ceiling; this isn’t its first appearance this season... it’ll be getting a programme biog next.

Written for the Financial Times.