When he co-adapted Molière’s The Miser for its current West End outing, Phil Porter acknowledged that play’s debt to the 3rd-century BC Roman comic playwright Plautus. As well he might, since he also had this Plautus adaptation/pastiche in the pipeline for the Royal Shakespeare Company. (Old Will wasn’t restrained in this respect himself; The Comedy Of Errors, for instance, is almost pure Plautus.) Its principal basis is Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Soldier), but it takes a raft of other Plautine references, remaking many of them for the third millennium AD.

The play’s subtitle offers a reasonable synopsis: The Decline And Fall Of General Braggadocio At The Hands Of His Canny Servant Dexter And Terence The Monkey. The twin weaknesses of the general (Felix Hayes, resplendent in sandals and Superman socks) are vanity and women, and his downfall comes with being tricked into freeing his concubine Voluptua... hey, if you think this is bad, two of his servants are named Omnivorous and Feclus (say it out loud). Anyway, Voluptua (Ellie Beaven) is freed thanks to the smart ideas of Dexter, who in Porter’s version is a woman. Sophia Nomvete forms a swift, warm bond with the audience. After the interval, Dexter unpacks a crate of groceries whilst recapping for us with a stream of dreadful puns as each item is produced, such as explaining the cunning “orange-mint” that has so far enabled Voluptua to rendezvous with her true love next door and ending, almost inevitably, with “That’s shallot”; Nomvete plays it beautifully, inviting us to groan as well as chuckle, bringing us all into the game.

Janice Honeyman’s production doesn’t necessarily start encouragingly: it kicks off at full fruitiness, leaving an uncertainty that things might misfire as that too-coarse Molière adaptation did. But it speedily acquires a cheeky authority, so that one knows that similes such as “she sits up straight like a defecating hound” are surely authentic, whilst it revels just as much in modern-parodic turns of phrase like “I’m as thick as the city walls”. And yes, Jon Trenchard capers non-stop as Terence the monkey. It occurs to me that under the artistic directorship of Gregory Doran there’s been much more vulgarity on the stages of the RSC. Good-o. Carry on, that man.

Written for the Financial Times.