Humorous drama

Dr Johnson was a man who sampled words like fine wines - inhaling every nuance before spitting them out with vigour - and his verbal portrait of Oliver Goldsmith is imbued with characteristically full-flavoured humour.

"No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had," he declared defiantly, yet in Out of Joint's boisterous response both to Goldsmith's life and his drama it is not just the man but the age that is revealed in all its folly and wisdom.

The playwright April de Angelis has soaked herself both in the obscenity and the learned debate of late 18th century London in order to present a provocative - if sometimes stiffly overintellectualised - account of the problems the stuttering Irishman experienced in achieving a live performance of She Stoops to Conquer. Although Hogarth was dead nine years before this happened, his gutter-bred vision of London and his portrait of the actor/theatre manager David Garrick casts a distinctive shadow over a plot that deals with a suspiciously animated wig, a poverty-stricken writer and the politics, prudery and perversion of what was deemed proper for the heavily censored English stage.

Director Max Stafford-Clark is now well-known for challenging contemporary playwrights to pen responses to existing works: most famously Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good was written in response to George Farqhar's The Recruiting Officer.

As the midwife to groundbreaking works by both Mark Ravenhill and Caryl Churchill, Stafford-Clark is in a better position than most to understand the financial, political and emotional considerations de Angelis's Garrick had to take into account when considering whether or not to give new drama a boost by staging Goldsmith's play - a tough decision, especially with Johnson breathing like a frustrated mammoth down his neck.

Julian McGowan's opulently cluttered set allows a handful of the audience to sit in boxes built onto the stage, so that the sense of a theatre within a theatre casts its spell over scenes, including Jason Watkins's amiably affected Garrick performing the sanitised, happy ending of King Lear.

On one level de Angelis seems to attack an age when radical, subversive, and, indeed, new drama was discouraged, yet when the audience member comes to watch the enjoyably rowdy second part of the production, She Stoops to Conquer, it is also striking that while he may have seemed controversial, Goldsmith was merely tapping into a dramatic tradition of master-servant reversal that had inspired writers from Plautus to Marivaux.

Johanna Town's painterly lighting design rewinds the centuries for a company whose performance of both plays is crowned by Ian Redford's stomping Dr Johnson and Monica Dolan's feistily manipulative Kate Hardcastle. This double production's leaden moments are easily outweighed by its cheekily transformative intelligence and vigour.

Until 29 March. Box office: 020 7452 3000.

She Stoops To Conquer