Rarely a season goes by without some regional playhouse producing She Stoops to Conquer; you begin to wonder if it is some hidden condition of Arts Council funding that audiences must be regularly reminded that Oliver Goldsmith's Georgian pot-boiler is moderately funny, but never quite as funny as you seem to remember.
What is usually lacking is a compelling reason to revive the piece, which Birmingham Rep seems to find when a flaming row breaks out between two of the ushers beforehand. One of them is furious that the other keeps standing her up - and it is only when you realise that the accusations are flying in crisp, rhyming couplets that it becomes apparent this may be a ruse.
The argument turns out to be an ingenious variation on the traditional prologue. Goldsmith's play would have a different introductory passage composed for each production (Garrick supplied the original), and Bryony Lavery does the honours here with an inspired piece of doggerel about "the rosy-fingered dawn, in russet cagoul clad, rising over yonder Bullring".
Determined to have her man, the snubbed usher resolves to put on a play to win him, at which point the stage magically transforms into a perfect replica of a Georgian playhouse. The play remains a single-joke conceit: a city sophisticate mistakes his prospective father-in-law's house for an inn, demands cold beef and receives egg on his face. But Jonathan Munby's production, beautifully designed by Mike Britton, brims with rude, Hogarthian energy.
Colin Baker's splenetic Hardcastle is as plump and red as a pulpit cushion; his wife is a tower of powdered hairdressing that has Liza Goddard in there somewhere; and Dorothea Myer- Bennett delightfully equates the wily Kate with the pain of the unrequited usher. Bring back the prologue, I say.
· Until November 17. Box office: 0121-236 4455.
