How do you present Goldoni's famous play? In Britain we all too easily lapse into a knockabout style I once dubbed Commedia dell' Hearty; in Italy, Strehler's long-lasting version was rooted in sombre realism. But in this RSC-Young Vic co-production Tim Supple, using a lively new adaptation by Lee Hall, treats the play exactly as he did Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors - as a serious story out of which the laughter grows organically.
Everyone remembers the play for the famous scene in which Truffaldino serves two meals simultaneously to his separate masters. But Supple and Hall put more stress on the reasons for his predicament. Truffaldino turns up in Venice as the servant of the male-disguised Beatrice and is left lunchless and wageless by his self-obsessed master. So when Florindo, Beatrice's lost lover, also appears and asks Truffaldino if he is gainfully employed, the answer is resoundingly negative. Grub and money become Truffaldino's motivations rather than, as when Tommy Steele essayed the part, the desire to do an ingratiating star-turn.
Jason Watkins, giving a dazzling performance based on desperation, never lets you forget that hunger is the hero's driving force. Trying to seal an opened letter with broken bread, he goes through agonies in his attempts not to swallow. And in the double-meal scene he is much less concerned with circus acrobatics than with the need to get his snout in the trough. At one point Watkins immerses himself in a pasta bowl, only to emerge with what looks a severe skin-rash, and his fingers delve into a soft, suet English currant pudding, leading him to ask, with amazed curiosity, "It can't really be dick, can it?" Watkins wittily plays off the audience without ever letting us forget that Truffaldino's manic ingenuity is based on gastronomic, and economic, necessity.
Lee Hall's version also reminds us that, in Goldoni as in Marivaux, servants are often sharper and cleverer than their masters. Above stairs, people suffer the ecstasies of love; below, they grasp life's realities. Finding her mistress driven to near-suicide by her lymphatic lover and told by him that women are all hysterics, Michelle Butterly's spunky Smeraldina rounds on the twit by telling him "the only reason we get all this stick is because we haven't got a dick" - clearly one of Hall's favourite words.
Yet the triumph of Supple's production is that it allows class and feminist points to emerge without disrupting the story's emotional reality; and it says much for his attention to the details of the drama that we actually yearn to see Claire Cox's boyish Beatrice reunited with Ariyon Bakare's cool dude of a Florindo. Played in eclectic modern dress, Supple's production is rich in Shakespearean echoes; and Robert Innes Hopkins's design, with changes of locale implied by vast double-doors crossing the traverse stage, reinforces the sensation we are watching a delightful Venetian comedy of errors.
At the Other Place (01789 403403) until January 22 and the Young Vic, London SE1 (0171 928 6363), from February 4
