We already have one answer to the David Tennant conundrum. Yes, a time lord with eyes like big, bulging marbles can not only cope with Hamlet the perplexing play, but convince you that he’s emerged from the Tardis as Hamlet the noble Danish prince. However, the role he takes in Love’s Labour’s

Lost presents a totally different challenge. At least until an ending that warns of deeper, darker work to come, the comedy shimmers, sparkles, frolics like a spring lamb — and demands that Tennant’s Berowne radiates unstoppable wit and humour.

Tennant comes close to doing that, too. As the brightest of the four lordlings persuaded by the King of Navarre to vow to renounce women for books, he doesn’t exactly sparkle or frolic.

Nor is his Scots-accented Berowne quite the madcap joker, the “man replete with mocks” whose prime appeal is to “shallow laughing fools”: which is how he’s described by Nina Sosanya’s enchanting young Rosaline, whom he hopes to marry. But he’s quick-witted, wry, waggish and mischievous enough to exchange a wink with a woman in the audience when the text asks him to compare her sex with unreliable timepieces.

The plot is sweet and light, as fits what was probably Shakespeare’s first romantic comedy. The four votaries’ promise of chastity is tested when Mariah Gale’s Princess of France arrives with three attendant ladies, each of whom turns out to have a soft spot for her male counterpart. Love games ensue, including the episode in which the men amusingly, if preposterously, pass themselves off as heavily bearded Muscovites. But the funniest scene in Gregory Doran’s production is the one that proved that the young Shakespeare was already a comic maestro. Each gallant successively discovers the love poem another has penned, ending with Tennant’s Berowne, who has been solemnly reproaching the King for breaking his oath, ripping and eating the evidence of his own treachery.

There are nice supporting performances. Joe Dixon is Don Armado, the parody Spaniard grandee who combines fake stateliness with a verbal delivery that gives ordinary English syllables embarrassing double meanings. And Oliver Ford Davies, playing the schoolmaster Holofernes, is every inch the earnest pedant, in love with long, Latinate words, but almost as besotted with the ladies, whose bottoms he’s apt to fondle and whose bosoms he ogles as he sonorously quotes Ovid on “odiferous flowers”. Courtly love and/or good-natured lust are everywhere in a revival that, thanks to Katrina Lindsay’s gold-and-white Elizabethan costumes, always looks gorgeous.

As for Tennant, he might be a more amused version of the early Benedick in Much Ado when Sosanya’s Rosaline directs insults at him, and a more romantic version of the late Benedick when he delivers a genuinely heartfelt apologia for marriage. The most serious moment comes at the close, when a black-clad messenger arrives to break up what’s now almost a playground rumpus with news of the French king’s death. The fun is over.

Everyone remembers that marriage is “a world-without-end bargain”. And Tennant’s Berowne is ordered to spend a probationary year bringing his trademark good humour to hospitals for the terminally ill. It’s a test that, like others in this enjoyable production, he’ll surely pass.

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