"The Mandrake". Exeter College Garden

What an extraordinary character Niccolo Machiavelli was. After acting as a political advisor to some of the most powerful figures in Europe he was arrested, tortured and exiled like someone out of The Godfather. He then wrote The Prince, a treatise so searingly honest about how to achieve and stay in power that it reads like satire – but isn’t. His life lessons for top politicians gave rise to a term, Machiavellian, that has no adequate synonym. What’s less well known is that he rehearsed the same principles in the form of comic drama, and his play Mandragora makes for a gurning, twisted sibling to his more serious work.

Oxford’s garden plays are a great summer tradition, and there have always been one or two forgotten classics from centuries past lurking amongst the Shakespeare comedies. It’s wonderful to see that Exeter College, and director Kian Moghaddas, are keeping this tradition going. This production of The Mandrake was everything a garden play should be: light, fun, accompanied by evocative lute music, a perfect summer dusk, and (perhaps best of all) blessed with the brilliant idea of moving into the Chapel after the interval, just when the evening was starting to get a bit too cold for comfort.

All the ingredients of Machiavelli’s philosophy of manipulation, deception and trickery are present, but transported from the circles of true political power to the more down-to-earth and familiar surroundings of traditional commedia dell’arte farce. Located in that hotbed of vice and intrigue, Florence, scheming young nobleman Callimaco wants to sleep with the beautiful young wife of slippered pantaloon Nicia, and he employs his conniving but charismatic comrade Ligurio to come up with a plot that will get him into Donna Lucrezia’s bed. These are well-trodden tropes. But there’s something in these characters’ ferociously single-minded pursuits of victory, money and power that constantly reminds you there’s something serious hovering in the background of the comedy. Ligurio in particular almost feels like Machiavelli himself, a puppeteer of society who even addresses the audience directly at the start to explain what we’re going to see. (And I should also mention Aymen Aulaiwi in a stand-out role as corrupt priest Friar Timoteo. He had the audience eating out of his cassock.)

The original Italian play would have been overflowing with topical humour, and the Exeter production rightly emulates that by modernising the language, referencing both the audience and the play itself in refreshingly post-modern style, and even dropping an F-bomb at one point. It’s almost indecently bawdy, with outrageous double entendres, penis-shaped false noses, and nuns literally bonking the local handyman in the vestry. This isn’t just Machiavelli. It’s Machiavelli meets Frankie Howerd. It’s Carry On Up the Uffizi.

It’s also, in case I hadn’t made this sufficiently clear, enormously enjoyable. As a garden play should, it takes you outside: outside your normal cares and woes, and outside the conventions by which we live our everyday lives. Looked at with the gimlet eye of modern sensibility, the borderline-rape coercion, gay jokes and sex-mad nuns would be an instant no-no. But what’s so appealing about this production is that it’s obviously part of and totally secure with considerate, inclusive modes of behaviour. And because of that, it can confidently turn those conventions upside-down just for fun. The gay jokes in particular become a genuine homoerotic subtext, which makes a perfect throbbing pulse beneath the increasingly-unconvincing heteromania.

How much of all this is present in Machiavelli’s original script? I’ve no idea. How much does that matter? Not one bit. Digging out a forgotten scrap of sixteenth-century Italian drama, and then having a ball with it, is, in my book, one of the things that Oxford is all about.