After the traumas of recent weeks what the Royal Shakespeare Company needs right now is a few good productions. And they have placed an each-way bet by opening The Swan's five-play season of Jacobethan rarities, performed by a company of 28 actors, with a City comedy in the afternoon and a Shakespearean chronicle in the evening.

Happily things get off to a highly lively start with Lucy Pitman-Wallace's revival of the 1605 Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston. The play's gags about the purchase of knighthoods got the first two of the trio slung into gaol: this production may, paradoxically, help get the RSC out of it.

Money, sex and class spin a neatly symmetrical plot. Touchstone, a thrifty Cheapside goldsmith, supports two apprentices - one industrious, one opportunist - and two similarly antithetical daughters. Good boy inevitably gets good girl.

But the fun lies in seeing the jumped-up daughter, Gertrude, married to an impecunious knight who, with the aid of the saucy apprentice, plots to rob her of her wealth to finance a disastrous Virginian venture.

Even if the three authors desperately contrive a happy ending, the real interest lies in the vindictive triumph of the bourgeoisie over their class superiors and get-rich-quick dreamers. There is real sadistic relish in Touchstone's exultation over the fact that his daughter, her maid and her mother, in pursuit of aristocratic castles in the air, are forced to spend the night in a coach "like three snails in a shell". And Gertrude retaliates in kind when she punningly and pithily retorts: "We shall as soon get a fart from a dead man as a farthing of courtesy here."

This is Jacobean comedy at its documentary best: a salty, vivid report on the eternal clash between the puritan ethic and spendthrift snobbery. Pitman-Wallace's production also strips the Swan to its bare brick walls and briskly gets down to business.

There is a peach of a performance from Amanda Drew whose Gertrude is a pouting brat affectedly pouring scorn on what she calls the "shittizens." Geoffrey Freshwater as Touchstone adroitly mixes vengefulness and bonhomie and there is rich support from Paul Bentall as a serpentine usurer and James Tucker as a rising apprentice who ends up as a Jacobean Ken Livingstone.

· In rep until September 14. Box office: 01789 403403.