Boss loves secretary. It's an old story. But what gives the tale a special kick in this 1613 Lope De Vega comedy, which gets the RSC's Spanish season off to an exhilarating start, is that the boss in question is a Naples-based countess who falls for her righthand man.
It's rather like seeing Webster's The Duchess of Malfi played for laughs. Class propels the action but Lope's real theme is the capriciousness of desire. The love of haughty Diana for her secretary, Teodoro, is only sparked when she catches him redhanded with one of her ladies-inwaiting - and she spends much of the subsequent action in a state of spiritual dither.
For his part, Teodoro rushes between the mistress and the maid like a flustered commuter. One hilarious scene, where he tries to leave for Spain while rooted to the spot, even reminds one of the endlessly protracted exit of the rozzers in The Pirates of Penzance.
At times you feel Lope is wringing the situation almost dry. But the comedy is sustained by the notion that all love is a form of madness. And, in the second half, Lope spruces up the plot with a neat trick in which Teodoro is identified as a bereaved count's long-lost son.
This development not only fuels the class confusion in the story but also leads to an ironically happy ending in which everyone gets paired off with brutal abandon.
But the joy of Laurence Boswell's production and David Johnston's translation is the way they lend these old Spanish practices a modern resonance: the characters become living archetypes of human giddiness.
And they are played to the hilt by a crack team. Rebecca Johnson's Diana is a superbly contradictory mix of iron propriety and bubbling passion. Joseph Millson, as the bewildered secretary, reminds me of the young Kevin Kline in his ability to mix romantic dash and comic absurdity.
The supporting roles are also eagerly grasped. Simon Trinder turns Teodoro's lackey into a bundle of popeyed, inventive energy. John Ramm, one half of the National Theatre of Brent, plays one of Diana's loony suitors with a wealth of nervous snickers and sawn-off rhetorical gestures. And Claire Cox lends Teodoro's original lover a bright-eyed ferocity. We think of Lope de Vega as a master of Spanish tragedy but this dazzling evening suggests he also had the comic brio of an Iberian Ayckbourn.
· In rep until October 2. Box office: 0870 6091110.
