Emma Rice, in her first production as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe (and only her second ever Shakespeare), gets straight down to it. What is her Globe going to be like? Under predecessors Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole, productions tended to walk a canny line between the decorum accorded to Shakespeare (and, indeed, to the reconstructed Globe) and the exuberance of the venue’s characteristic audience. If Rice’s début is anything to go by, any remotely po-faced element has been tossed over the Thames embankment wall.

She has begun with our favourite comedy (the RSC are currently touring their own production as “A Play for the Nation”), staged it in the effervescent style familiar from her work with Kneehigh, and then pushed it a bit further still. Stu Barker supplies a poppy score dominated by duelling electric guitar and sitar (yes, if you want to hear an overdriven sitar, Shakespeare’s Globe is the place to go); the musical numbers include settings of Sonnet 116, John Donne’s To His Mistress Going To Bed and, er, “Space Oddity”. The fairies are dressed in a sort of kinky Elizabethan couture (doublets open to reveal naked torsos, fishnet tights), while the Athenians are in modern-day casual. Except they aren’t Athenians, but Londoners: Puck rushes through the forest in search of a “Hoxton hipster”, and the rude mechanicals are supposedly Globe ancillary staff (“Nick Bottom, health and safety officer”). There’s a fair bit of rewriting, interpolation and frankly libidinous writhing, led by cabaret artist Meow Meow as Titania and Katy Owen as an incessantly mischievous Puck. (Zubin Varla provides a countervailing dignified fulcrum to the action as Oberon.)

Big fun, then, but rather less focus. Questions arise such as why, if Rice is determined to increase the proportion of women on the Globe stage (all the mechanicals bar Bottom are female here), she changes one of the young lovers, Helena, into Helenus? Liberal sexual signals, but some pretty clunking rewrites. Above all, I’m not sure there’s a lot of underlying trust of Shakespeare’s material here. It’s as if he’s regarded as someone who offers a lot of opportunities for inserting comedy rather than being much cop at providing it himself. When you modernise Shakespeare, you do need to leave a sufficient core of Shakespeare; similarly, the Globe is such a cherished project it can’t simply be treated as something that stands where it does and is shaped the way it is, to host whatever kind of work one fancies. It’s a cultural package. But it’s early days yet.

Written for the Financial Times.