With the poet Roger McGough adapting, this was always going to keep mostly to Molière’s storyline — but he retells it in couplets that stretch the idea of rhyme to bizarrely inventive limits. The language is studded with jokes, including fart jokes, one of which starts the play off, as Clive Francis’s Argan, the hypochondriac of the title, struggles to empty himself offstage.

In a prologue Francis briefly plays Molière, who died during one of the play’s first performances in 1673.

But no such calamity takes the edge off the comedy here, and the evening closes with an apt line about medicinal compounds, efficacious in every case, to remind us of when McGough sang Lily the Pink with the Scaffold.

The dialogue may be contemporary, but the setting is kept in Molière’s time, when doctors were feared as the agents of death. In Argan’s case, however, they want to keep him alive and invent fatal infirmities with alarming Latin names that only their costly compounds can keep at bay. Argan decides to marry his daughter to the bonehead son of one of these doctors, and it is up to her and his servant Toinette to thwart his plans and free her to marry the man she loves.

Francis gives Argan a more genial temperament than in the original, though it is hard to imagine him otherwise, given the dapper wordplay. But if this merriment reduces the element of danger in his paternal tyranny, it is hard to complain while enjoying the relish that Francis brings to the lines.

The play whirls along under Gemma Bodinetz’s direction, giving it scenes of physical comedy as well as verbal. This physical nonsense mostly comes from Toby Dantzic’s wonderfully ridiculous Thomas, Argan’s mad choice as son-in-law. Rocking his body sideways on spindly legs, he delivers his idea of a marriage proposal while jerking his head 45 degrees this way and that.

Brigid Zengeni, monumental in scarlet, brings a sense of menace as Argan’s covetous wife. Lucinda Raikes, as the daughter, pulls some funny faces when emphasising horror, though she comes across as rather silly in the operatic interlude, misunderstanding the coded hints from her beloved — the very dashing Jake Harders. Leanne Best’s Toinette has a splendid opening line, telling her master to keep his hair-shirt on, but when pretending to be a learned dottore from Padua her fierce Italian accent drives away the comedy. This lapse apart, the company make this co-production with English Touring Theatre an evening of sweet pleasure.

Box office: 0151-709 4776, to July 11. Then touring in the autumn

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