Not much links these two plays except that they are both set in Italy and have been yoked together for the RSC's anuual mobile theatre tour. But the shock lies in discovering that Shakespeare's supposedly daft early comedy yields infinitely more pleasure than his ripe Roman tragedy.
Like David Thacker a decade ago, Fiona Buffini has set Two Gents in the 1930s. But where Thacker beguiled us with pop songs by Gershwin and Porter, Buffini uses the period setting to bring out the high style of Milan, which becomes a fashion-plate whirl of slinky women, brilliantined men, hectic parties and hot jazz. Without overplaying the point, Buffini also suggests there is a homoerotic twist to this tale of love and betrayal in which the caddish Proteus attempts to steal his best friend's girl.
When Laurence Mitchell's Proteus and Alex Avery's Valentine initially part, you half expect them to indulge in a farewell kiss. And later, when Valentine shockingly says to Proteus "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee", you realise this is a world in which male bonding counts for more than hetero urges. What is usually seen as a trial run for the later comedies here becomes an intriguing study of what Rene Girard called "triangular desire", in which two men are indissolubly linked by their desire to possess the same woman.
Buffini implies all this with grace and wit. And, even if she strangely bungles the classic scene in which the eloping Valentine is caught with with a tell-tale rope ladder, she brings out the extent to which the women become bemused spectators of laddish love-games. Rachel Pickup's excellent Silvia has a touching vulnerability as she is cast adrift wearing little more than a Freudian slip and Vanessa Ackerman movingly suggests that Julia's passion for Proteus is sadly misplaced.
Where Buffini redefines an unregarded play, David Farr's Julius Caesar combines all the cliches of contemporary Shakespeare: leather-jacketed conspirators, combat-fatigued battle-scenes and stylised violence. Zubin Varla brings out Brutus's tortured self-regard, Gary Oliver is a suitably slippery Mark Antony and Adrian Schiller a bitterly waspish Cassius.
But although the programme is filled with references to Putin and Berlusconi, the production touches a contemporary nerve only at one point: when Brutus urges the assassination of Caesar, even if "the quarrel will bear no colour for the thing he is", we suddenly seem to be in the chilling world of pre-emptive regime-change. That aside, it's hard to believe the well-drilled school parties emerged with fresh understanding of Shakespeare's most overrated play.
· Until October 23. Box office: 01495 350360. Then touring.
