First Night: Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare's Globe, London

In the 10 years of its existence, Shakespeare's Globe has steered clear, until now, of Love's Labour's Lost. You can understand why. With its spirited satire on verbal affectation and arid learning and its clever literary parodies, this is linguistically the trickiest of the comedies to put across to a contemporary audience.

One of the attractive features of the Globe is that many of the punters are newcomers to Shakespearean performance, but there are patches in this play that are impenetrable even to people well-versed in the Bard's works. Jokes involving schoolboy Latin or spry spoofing of euphuistic conceits are not exactly calculated to tickle the ribs of today's tourists.

So it's a pleasure to report that Dominic Dromgoole's zestful production succeeds in captivating the audience to a degree that I would not have thought possible. Recent revivals have tended to mistrust the play by shifting it to 20th-century environments. The King of Navarre and his three young friends who make a vow to forswear the company of women and devote themselves to study for three years have been reinvented as merchant bankers in a City skyscraper (which made their oath inexplicable) and as rock musicians in retreat at a Maharishi-style ashram.

It's a refreshing change, therefore, to see this most Elizabethan of Shakespeare's comedies presented in period. Jonathan Fensom's design is a delight, lashing large book-illustrations of trees to the pillars and sending an Elizabethan knot garden out into the courtyard - an elaborate double hexagon that heightens a sense of the formality of the sparring between the young noblemen and the visiting ladies who distract them from their doomed attempt at self-denial.

As Berowne, the wittiest but most insensitively clever of the immature males, Trystan Gravelle gives a performance of real comic clout, equipping this wordsmith with a Welsh accent that deftly suggests a windbag emotional defensiveness, though he could afford to put a lot more stress on the character's snooty sophistication.

Michelle Terry is a sparky, mettlesome Princess, but it feels a tactical mistake that the production allows the ladies to lapse into a raucous bun-fight with the nobles just before the shock announcement of death that lays a chill on the fifth act. Doesn't sinking so fully to the men's level rather diminish their right to dictate the terms of the postponed happy ending?

Timothy Walker brings a hilariously tragic self-involvement to the Spanish braggart Don Armado, while Christopher Godwin as the preposterously pedantic schoolmaster even adds some dotty puns of his own, "arse-suring" us, for example, that "the posterior of the day" is a sweet and apt term to denote "the afternoon". Robust and full of brio, the production may be stronger on horseplay than on subtle wordplay, but it's a treat to see just how much of the comedy communicates itself to the loudly appreciative audience.