A Mad World, My Masters: the funniest play in Stratford in a long while

It’s hard to say anything about this uproarious show without falling into the appalling sexual wordplay which besmirches Sean Foley and Phil Porter’s version of A Mad World, My Masters, Thomas Middleton’s satiric comedy of 1605. Putting in its first ever appearance on a Stratford stage, Middleton’s play, as written, is itself as cornucopian a feast of Jacobean rudery as you could imagine. In updating the play to 1950s Soho – shortly before the Christine Keeler scandal began, Foley and Porter have had no need to modernise the scurrility, merely to trim away obscurities so that it scores as riotously, sometimes groaningly so, as it would have done four centuries ago. Nothing so timeless in language, nothing so inexhaustible, as obscenity.

But Middleton’s Mad World isn’t a show by Flanagan and Allen’s Crazy Gang, Benny Hill or a spiced-up Carry On film. It’s a richly layered comedy in which, as one of the characters puts it, all sins are venial but venereal.