Salvation for the RSC's Spanish Golden Age season comes, appropriately, from a 17th century Mexican nun. For after the recent failure of Tamar's Revenge, Nancy Meckler's exuberant production of this romantic farce by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, has the undeniable smell of success.
I wouldn't make exaggerated claims for the play. Even though it is astonishing to find a convent intellectual in 1683 satirising the Spanish honour-code, it is stronger on intrigue than character. We watch, faintly bemused, as a pair of Toledo siblings, Dona Ana and Don Pedro, wrestle with the entrapment within their house of the objects of their respective desires.
The dilemma is that the couple on whom they dote, Don Carlos and Dona Leonor, are desperately in love with each other; and the plot hinges on the siblings' bungled machinations and the lovers' attempt to extricate themselves from their clutches.
The real pleasure, however, comes in Meckler's festive production and one particular stellar performance. For a start, Meckler grasps the religious ethos behind the romantic shenanigans and even treats the faintly self-regarding Leonor as an image of the author herself.
Borrowing a device from Chinese classical theatre and Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy, Meckler also has characters stumbling around in supposed darkness on a brightly lit stage: an ideal metaphor for a play in which people are forever making passes at the wrong partner.
This reaches its fulfilment in one hilarious scene in which Don Carlos's servant, Castrano, decides the only way to escape death is to don female attire: as played by the RSC's dazzling comic discovery, Simon Trinder, the episode combines the ambiguity of Some Like It Hot with the vulgarity of Charley's Aunt. Warming to his disguise, Trinder primpingly announces "I'm so dark the blue looks divine on me."
But, finding himself seriously pursued by William Buckhurst's stiffly ardent Don Pedro, Trinder resorts to fanning himself between his spreadeagled legs. It is a knockout performance in a fine ensemble, in which Joseph Millson's Carlos erupts with volcanic passion, Claire Cox's Ana seethes with intemperate jealousy and Rebecca Johnson's Leonor emerges as chastely erotic.
And, even if no masterpiece has been uncovered, Catherine Boyle's sparky translation suggests that Sor Juana's play offers a subversive Mexican wave to her Spanish colonial masters.
· Until October 1. Box office: 0870 6091110
