A world removed from the original

You can rely on the Globe theatre for exuberantly slapstick and slap-happy productions. True to form director Sue Lefton serves up this most rare revival of Thomas Middleton's satirical, city comedy of 1605 as an adolescent romp.

She and her actors extinguish most of those important glimmers of moral seriousness which cause A Mad World to survive as a sardonic play for today. The style of jovial caricature, with lurid costumes ranging from the Jacobean to 1960s flares, crushed velvet and cuban heels, admittedly raises coarse laughter. But coarseness limits and reduces Middleton.

A Mad World is the playwright's vision of Londoners in hot pursuit of money and sex. Two complex plots are awkwardly dovetailed, both involving a highly theatrical use of disguise. In the first Dick Follywit robs and outwits his snobbish grandfather, Sir Bounteous; in the second, Penitent Brothel, who is a man not a whore-house, schemes to have sex with Mistress Harebrain whose Puritan husband is possessed by Eros. Lefton's actors envisage these people as lovable rascals rather than as unfairly grasping, randy and guilt-ridden.

To read the comedy (best available for £6.99 in Oxford University Press's World's Classics with three other Middleton plays ) is to gather what the production misses. Wil Johnson's boringly vacuous Follywit, Jonathan Cecil's Sir Bounteous wafting around in a dressing-gown and tones of eccentric bemusement, Belinda Davison's preening courtesan and David Rintoul's desperatelyfarcical Pentitent Brothel are all rough turns.

Only John McEnery's magnificent Harebrain - a black-garbed Puritan with fanaticism resounding in his nasal tones catches the right, dark comedy.

It's A Mad World My Masters