Making broad Shakespearean comedy funny for a 21st-century audience often feels a stretch. But in his hectically paced, sitcom-inspired production of Merry Wives, Christopher Luscombe succeeds triumphantly in doing not only that, but in making the play's multiple plot strands and every one of its characters, down to the most minor, ring out with joyous, bell-like clarity.

The director has turned the Globe's tricky logistics to advantage. Its hefty pillars make perfect hiding places for tricksters; a front platform in the yard, linked to the main stage by two walkways, lends an additional dimension for scenes of intimate scheming.

Better still, the platform wittily flips over to transform into an Elizabethan garden, complete with love seat, where the titular merry wives rendezvous to plot Falstaff's undoing.

The men meet later on the same spot for an equally gossipy, giggly encounter, neatly demonstrating that even the representatives of Church and State, Parson Evans and Justice Shallow, are not above a little delicious intrigue.

That playful, good-natured delight in mischief-making informs the entire production — and if the humour is sometimes coarse, it works well in a theatre that flourishes under bold strokes. There are sight gags, double takes and silly costumes galore.

Andrew Havill's Basil Fawlty-inflected Frank Ford, terrified of being cuckolded, dons a ridiculous blond bobbed wig when disguised to catch his wife revelling with Christopher Benjamin's extravagantly corpulent Falstaff.

Will Belchambers, as a lanky Slender whose suit to the pretty Anne Page is half-hearted since he is clearly gay, sports lurid green tights that make him appear possessed of frog's legs. And those are a delicacy that might be enjoyed by Philip Bird's ludicrously self-regarding, heavily accented French doctor Caius.

The text is spoken with a rhythmic relaxation that lends it a fresh immediacy, and the acting displays an infectious relish. Serena Evans as Mistress Page and Sarah Woodward as Mistress Ford are full of girlish fun, tempered by mature feminine wisdom.

And Benjamin's Falstaff is an irresistibly lovable rogue, whose hilarious vanity in imagining he can seduce these two loyal wives is undercut by his own wry admissions of his girth. Got up in stag's antlers for his appearance in the guise of the mythical Herne the Hunter, he is, he remarks, “the fattest stag in the forest”.

That scene features a climactic sequence of masked medieval mummery bursting with a grotesque glee worthy of The Wicker Man. Yet the carnivalesque abandon subsides into a restoration of marital order, and a renewal of Ford's faith in the affections of his wife, that is surprisingly touching. A wonderfully warm comedy, stuffed to bursting with belly laughs.

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