Emma Rice’s production is an all-singing, all-dancing, all-capering non-stop fun-fest. There’s just one thing that might make it perfect: a bit of Shakespeare.

Yes, of course I’m being unkind, but as exaggerations go, it’s far from wild. It takes ten minutes, an entirely new prologue and three song-and-dance numbers before the first words from the play are spoken... and they’re words from the end. Two and a half hours later, the final song “The Rain It Raineth Every Day” is cut to three lines, its bulk replaced by some more new stuff. Rice’s frequent Kneehigh collaborator Carl Grose is credited with “additional text and lyrics”; sometimes it feels as if it ought to be “additional material by William Shakespeare”. Musical numbers abound (though hardly ever the ones Shakespeare wrote), and gags are cut, inserted, updated even when there’s no problem understanding them.

The most conspicuous instance of butchery is Feste. This sombre, clever clown is, with his counterpart in King Lear, among the greatest fools in all of drama. Rice more or less cuts him entirely. A few of his lines – but none of the material which establishes his character and through him the ambivalent tone of the entire play – are reassigned to Fabian, a figure far more dispensable. Feste’s mock-priest scene and his name are given to the bearded drag artist Le Gateau Chocolat (imagine Isaac Hayes in a gold-sequinned dress... now try ever to forget that image), who is a magnificent singer but fulfils no function whatever in the play except to personify how it’s been farted about with.

On its own terms the production rollicks. Marc Antolin as Andrew Aguecheek eclipses even the estimable Tony Jayawardena as Toby Belch, and Katy Owen follows Tamsin Greig at the National as the second impressive female Malvolio of 2017. (Several characters are now gratuitously Scottish, so in contrast Owen exaggerates her own Welsh accent.) But there could hardly be a production more calculated to illustrate the reasons which led to the controversial decision that this, Rice’s second year at the helm of this venue, is to be her last. It’s as if she’s either never noticed or never heeded the first word of its name.

Written for the Financial Times.