I am more conservative than I like to think when it comes to staging Shakespeare.  Add bits of new business, is my position, as long as they’re consonant with the text; if you have to rewrite to justify what you’re doing, then into the outer darkness with you. On that basis, Fiona Laird’s RSC Merry Wives should have me calling down fire and brimstone with Paisleyite fervour. It begins with a new prologue which uses the claim that Elizabeth I commanded Shakespeare to write a play about Falstaff in love, but adds that Will had a tight deadline, which feels like a pre-emptive excuse for doing it crappily.  But no, not at all.

Yes, Laird has directed the play not unlike a 21^st-century TV sitcom: perky scene-change musical stings, sharp-tongued exchanges, even one or two cutaway gags featuring a couple of Polish-speaking menials. Lez Brotherston’s wonderful design has the cast dressed in clever syntheses of period and modern costume. Mistresses Ford and Page hatch their plot to chasten the fat, amorous Falstaff at a spa day; jealous husband Ford disguises himself as a bung-wielding Russian oligarch. But somehow, it all pays off, and in ways that chime with the spirit of the play rather than stifling it. For every potentially annoying update, such as turning the laundry basket in which Falstaff hides into a rank dumpster, there are a whole handful of dividends, from the knight’s gross-out state afterwards to the incongruous delight of hearing the term “wheelie-bin” repeatedly in Shakespearean text.

The visually distinctive David Troughton is unrecognisable as Falstaff, with combover and ludicrous codpiece. He gives a broader performance than usual, but no less masterly: his post-dumpster speech is pitched and timed to perfection. The normally dignified Jonathan Cullen prats about to a delicious degree as the French doctor Caius, right from his opening addition, “Quelle catastrophe, ce Brexit”.  Turning the Host of the Garter Inn, possibly the blokiest character Shakespeare ever wrote, into a woman ought to be disastrous, yet Katy Brittain makes the Hostess a vibrant Essex woman of a certain age. Toby Park of Spymonkey takes a credit for physical comedy direction, with a number of extravagant sequences. Unregenerate purists will be much displeased; let them be, while the rest of us have our ribs persistently tickled.

Written for the Financial Times.