Anybody who feared that the RSC’s year-long Bardathon might become a respectful trot or worthy trudge through tragedies, histories and earnestly interpreted comedies certainly got their answer last night.

Gregory Doran’s adaptation and production of The Merry Wives of Windsor is what the title promises: light, larky and, with Paul Englishby composing and Ranjit Bolt providing the lyrics, packed with music evoking everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Verdi to American Hoe-Down to, well, Shakespeare.

It’s good seasonal stuff and extremely well cast: Simon Callow as a Falstaff with billowing silvery hair indebted to Frans Hals, a tum that seems to conceal a wheelbarrow and a fruity gurgle of an accent; Alexandra Gilbreath and Haydn Gwynne as the Windsor ladies, incongruously attired in bandbox 1950s frocks, who tease him and punish his lewd advances; Alistair McGowan as Ford, the most jealous of their husbands, looking like a weird mix of Western sheriff, French waiter and Mr Pooter; and Judi Dench as Mistress Quickly.

Here’s where Doran has made his principal change. Wisely, he’s cut the abstruse episode in which a Welsh preacher and a French doctor take revenge on the innkeeper who has directed each of them to the wrong site for their duel; but more questionably he’s given Dench’s Quickly greater emphasis. She now berates Falstaff for bankrupting her in Henry 1V and, invited by him to his bedroom, at first seems to agree, with a soupy song about bees being drawn to unsuitable honeysuckles, and then inexplicably takes off with Brendan O’Hea’s Goth-like Pistol.

Still, this lets us see more of Dame Judi than we should, and she gives a performance that’s simultaneously warm, mischievous and, helped by a frizz of red hair, just a bit slatternly. Maybe Callow misses the lechery Shakespeare wanted; but his portrait of raddled gentility is beautifully judged and he makes the most of the comic moments, cumbersomely cramming himself into a hamper full of old clothes to escape Ford and, after he’s been tipped in the Thames, creakily reappearing accoutred with mud, lichen and one dead fish.

McGowan rises to the comic challenge, too, especially when he feverishly searches the hamper that this time doesn’t contain Falstaff, hurling out underclothes in the mad belief that the fat knight is lurking in a tiny corner. But was it right to give him songs that might have come from Les Mis? Surely it’s clear he’s unhappy about becoming a cuckold without him solemnly singing about Falstaff “burning in the fire of my hate”. Certainly this fits very oddly in a production that sacrifices subtlety of observation for broad effects.

Still, one can’t be over-protective of what is, after all, Shakespeare’s slightest comedy. And who can complain when that fine comic actor Simon Trinder, playing the gormless swain Slender, is swigging back booze in an energetically sung, cheerily choreographed, thoroughly Christmassy salute to sack?

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