The Rivals, Southwark Playhouse

'Tis the season to be jolly. Or, if you're a small theatre and choose not to stoop to panto, time perhaps to be a little light, anyway, tickle some tastebuds. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1775) is his best-known play, followed by The School for Scandal and The Critic. In his early twenties when he wrote The Rivals (and then, after its first London outing was howled down, rewrote it), Sheridan spawned a skittish, playful, self-consciously silly classic, arch and brilliant.

And by jingo, wordy. In Jessica Swale's new production for the Red Handed Theatre Company, at the Southwark Playhouse, the cast sultrily lulls the audience, before the lights are dimmed, away from any thoughts of verbal concentration - the actors mooch about, in approximately decorative late-18th-century garb, wink at the front row, flirt, offer them nuts, chat, offer more nuts and wink again. There are music and singing. It's all very casual, cool and anti-theatrical. Unfortunately, as soon as the text is delivered, cool becomes lexically contorted caper. The Rivals is, today, more about close listening, in a kind of socio-historical decoding, than dramatically arresting entertainment.

It's a stupid story. Nice upper-class card Jack Absolute fancies a novel-reading girly, Lydia Languish, in Bath, but to titillate her sentimental fantasies woos her as indigent Beverley (Wilde must have borrowed something here for his Jack/Ernest double in his most famous play). Lydia's friend Julia Melville is soft on foppish idiot Faulkland, and a rather asinine love wins out in the end. Lydia's aunt, the infamous Mrs Malaprop, is determined to forge an alliance between her niece and her toff friend Sir Anthony Absolute's (real) son Jack, but becomes confused, like everyone else, including the audience, at the shadowy "Beverley", who ends up being challenged to a duel by two more idiots, rivals - indeed - for Lydia's affection, Bob Acres and Sir Lucius O'Trigger.

Through large passages of the play, one’s will to live is violently stretched. Yet to her credit, Swale has kept things simple, because she has to: the Southwark stage is long and thin, the audience is on raked seating, close to the action, and little will escape even the most bored eye, or ear. Luckily, she has some really fine acting to save what is otherwise an interpretatively dim production.

As Malaprop, Celia Imrie is excluded from the above accolade. Famous from TV - Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies, Cranford etc - and film - Calendar Girls, St Trinian’s - she cuts an attractive, bosomy swathe in her big dress, and has expert facial skills, winking amongst them, but strangely does the opposite of filling the part. She gabbles, glides over the malapropisms (too wearying to recite here) and seems to shy away from being large.

By contrast, and not to do her a discourtesy, Ella Smith, of Dawn French girth, is wonderful as Julia, with a voice of purple-plum richness: she’s unaffectedly funny. Robin Soans is also punchy and funny as the martinet Sir Anthony. As Lydia, Charity Wakefield is poised and, well, precisely girly. The only person who seems to get the joke of the play, its ludic absurdity, is Harry Hadden-Paton. As Jack Absolute, he swaggers, teases and is even romantically sincere in a bravura, intelligent performance which threatens to make this show a must.

Hadden-Paton is an actor to watch. If everyone else in the cast marched to his tune, then this Rivals might be unrivalled; as it is, it kind of works, but I fear the charming studio space of the Southwark Playhouse keeps it far too tame, too - charming.

• The Rivals booking performances at the Southwark Playhouse until 30 January.