"The School for Scandal". Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Typical, isn’t it? You wait twenty years for a School For Scandal, then two come along at once.

Last month’s production at the Oxford Playhouse flattered to deceive. With its garish colours, 1950s styling and gossip-mag-themed programme, it promised a satirical updating of Sheridan’s original. But it failed to deliver, by simply playing all the wrong notes when it came to the performance itself.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s approach also seeks out contemporary relevance for Sheridan’s comedy of bad manners. You might almost say it’s desperate to underline, with the boldest, pinkest pen it can find, the societal links between 1777 and 2024. Huge chunks of new text have been created and inserted into the play, rhyming monologues in which characters draw attention to our own obsession with social media, reality TV and culture wars. When the gossip journalist Snake (Tadeo Martinez) raises an eyebrow and tells us all to go and check our ‘digital devices’ during the interval, it should, by all the rules of literary convention, feel jarring and out of place.

But it doesn’t. On the contrary, it feels like Sheridan himself peering into his crystal ball and being as amused by the foibles of our own age as he was by the shortcomings of his own.

Opinions will always differ on the rights and wrongs of altering classic texts. Would you do something so crass as add a thumping disco beat to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to make it more accessible to modern audiences? Of course you wouldn’t. But Walter Murphy did in 1976, and created a worldwide dancefloor sensation, so who makes the rules? There are so many newly-minted interpolations in this School for Scandal that it might almost be called an adaptation. It sits – and sits very comfortably – somewhere between, at one extreme, an unabridged version, and at the other Jack Absolute Flies Again, which was a complete reworking of Sheridan’s The Rivals. This production walks a tightrope between the two. It’s a middle School.

Director Tinuke Craig has been very smart with this decision. There is little doubt that Sheridan, one of the greatest wits and most outrageous characters ever to grace the English or Irish stage, does need a bit of a helping hand to make his vibrant drollery sing to a modern audience. Whether that is done by cutting a few characters or adding a few words, the important thing is that it’s done in the true spirit of Sheridan himself, and for the most part in this production, that line between new and old is seamless. A shout of ‘Fuck! I quit!’ from Joseph Surface’s servant Lappet does momentarily shatter the illusion, but for the most part, as when Siubhan Harrison’s delectably devious Lady Sneerwell introduces us to her social circle, it feels like a character from the past politely poking their nose into our world, and showing us the way to their own.

Restoration (or, yes, post-restoration) comedy needs to be crisp, fast and crystal clear, otherwise it can descend into a tedious morass of wigs and improbable surnames. And this production has clarity and crispness in abundance. Craig’s direction makes the sections of exposition wonderfully tight and well-choreographed, like a high-society fashion show. Characters pose in vogueish dance postures while Lady Sneerwell tells us their sordid backstories. Each of the scene locations is boldly displayed on the back wall, so we know exactly where we are. Even the schemes of Sir Oliver Surface are projected comically onto the backdrop, as ‘The Stanley Plan’ and ‘The Premium Plan’. Every time the dissembling Joseph Surface (Stefan Adegbola) launches into one of his pretentious aphorisms an ironic halo of holy light shines on him and a heavenly choir bursts into song. But best of all, every single character has a sharply delineated visual identity, slightly larger than life and perfectly controlled, like the Gillray cartoons that Sheridan himself would have seen on a daily basis. From Lady Teazle (Tara Tijani) leaping and stomping like an angry squirrel, to Sir Benjamin Backbite (Patrick Walshe McBride) pacing around like a Maribou stork that’s trodden in something disgusting, they all have a precise, comically calibrated, signature style.

Special mention must go to Emily Houghton’s Mrs Candour. On the page, Candour is no more or less repulsive than any of her companions, but Houghton has turned her into a comic creation of monstrous proportions, relishing with barely concealed glee everything she professes to hate. She looks like a combination of Olivia Colman and ‘Tubs’, the woman in the League of Gentlemen’s ‘Local Shop’, and she’s every bit as terrifying and hilarious.

The majority of this cast can also be seen in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the two plays share more than just actors. They both make great use of a central trapdoor, with scenery popping up cartoonishly before our eyes. And, in conjunction with The Buddha of Suburbia, the three plays form a trifecta of satirical sex comedies that span 400 years with almost perfect precision: Merry Wives in about 1597, School for Scandal in 1777, and Buddha in 1977. What unites them is a vivacious, life-affirming sexual appetite. This isn’t No Sex Please, We’re British. Across those centuries, according to Shakespeare, Sheridan and Kureishi, the urban elite were bonking like nobody’s business.

In producing these three plays, the RSC’s new Artistic Directors, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, have announced their tenure with bold, raunchy irreverence. The future’s bright; the future’s pink.