Shakespeare’s greatest comic scenes — I’m thinking especially of Malvolio’s gulling and its aftermath in Twelfth Night — seldom if ever seem as funny on the stage as they do on the page and in the reader’s imagination. The prime exception is the episode in Much Ado when Benedick’s friends suggest to the eavesdropping bachelor that he’s loved by his apparent foe, Beatrice. But not even Donald Sinden or Roger Allam, the finest Benedicks I recall, achieved as much as Simon Russell Beale does in Nicholas Hytner’s gently hilarious, subtly serious, always delicate revival of Shakespeare’s comedy.

He nervously listens, then scuttles about Vicki Mortimer’s set — a box of slats within a Sicilian piazza — desperately convincing himself he’s avoiding detection. Then, finding nowhere else to hide, submerges himself in a pool from which he eventually emerges, a spoof Poseidon who has just triumphed over a shark. And when Zoë Wanamaker’s Beatrice appears to call him into dinner she stands bug-eyed with disbelief as this soaked lunatic poses, primps and swaggers like the lover he has suddenly become.

It’s very funny, but what’s really striking is that, while he promises he’ll be “horribly in love” as he hilariously hops in the water, Russell Beale makes us feel Benedick’s tenderness and need. And it’s the same with Beatrice’s parallel gulling by her women, which also ends with a dousing. “Benedick, love on, I will requite you,” Wanamaker says quietly — and, yes, she means it.

These are terrific performances: both reminding us that a wary love abortively burgeoned between Benedick and Beatrice long ago. That has left him touchy, edgy, angrier than he realises, and her with a mix of vulnerability, restlessness, suppressed bitterness and a slight drinking problem. She even makes a tipsy pass at Julian Wadham’s Prince, though she remembers herself before he can react. And it’s those beautifully judged switches between humour and gravity that make their pairing exceptional.

Thanks to some splendidly atmospheric music, and maids who sweep, scrub and occasionally canoodle, Hytner’s production has a warm and, defying the Olivier’s size, domestic feel. Moreover, Daniel Hawksford’s Claudio isn’t the usual smug pup but a shy, inexperienced boy genuinely appalled at what he sees as Hero’s betrayal, and Andrew Woodall is the best Don John I’ve seen.

It’s he who tricks Claudio into believing Susannah Fielding’s artless Hero a slut and, boy, does he do it well. He’s pale, sweaty, sullen, world-weary, sick with a sort of exhausted loathing of his fellow creatures. At times I thought he was the Iago that Ewan McGregor isn’t quite at the Donmar. And the result is what Much Ado should be: Othello with laughs and a happy ending.

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