Anyone interested in beautiful clothes, devastating wit and wild romantic confusion should this week be watching The Rivals, Sheridan’s simple story of just how much trouble some people get into when falling in love. The performance opens with music, caricatures and candlelight courtesy of a wildly lurching candelabra; the Eighteenth Century, drawn in broad strokes.

It takes a moment to tune into the language, but the themes (lovers crossed, mistaken identities, abortive duels) are so familiar and the acting so exuberant that confusion is impossible, except where the plot demands it. Young lovers Jack (irrepressible coat-swishing charm from Anthony Wilks) and Lydia (Amy Jackson, positively bursting with romantic verve) are trying to keep love alive in a world of arranged marriages and overbearing relatives; Faulkland (Matt Addis), gloriously foppish and brimming with sensibility, and Julia (Olivia Grant) have their elders’ blessings but find it impossible to be sure of each other. Add romantic rivals in the form of boistrous, country-dance obsessed Acres (Tim Younger) and the broad and ridiculous Lucius O’Trigger (David Guthrie) and the scene is set for a nicely complicated path to happiness.

ODT is a company which brings together older and younger actors, giving us both a proper boy in Leo Oakes and a pleasurable depth to the older roles. Alex Nicholls plays Jack’s dirty old father with gleeful, eye-popping relish, and Sheila McKean is perfectly proper as the fatuous, fantastic Mrs Malaprop. Watch out also for a deliciously avaricious Cathy Oakes, and Geoff Baker making a thoroughly disreputable impression as Jack’s servant and go-between, Fag. If the endless agonising over true romance seems somewhat silly, this is (at least partly) the point; so follow the lead of the mockery of their elders, and have a good laugh at just how ridiculous love truly can be!

Jeremy Dennis, 06.05.03