There is, heaven knows, hardly a likeable character on the stage in this production. Not a man you'd dare to introdudce to your daughter and hardly a woman you'd trust in the same room with someone else's husband.

 Indeed, the only female in the whole play who displayes anything like marital fidelity is driven to it by such cantankerous jealousy that you wouldn't blame her spouse for confirming all her nagging suspicions and bedhopping with her best friend. Which is exactly what he duly does.

John Vanburgh wrote this cyncial Restoration satire after extended travels abroad as architect to the aristocracy. Which might explain his distinctly non-judgmental (therefore, unBritish) approach to sex.

 He constructed it rather as he designed Blenheim Palace: with formidable flourish, an immense and rather chillling monument to be wondered at and admired rather than something homey to be lived in.

 Director Ian Judge opts for a slightly more welcoming halfway house. The open acting arena is draped by designer Tim Goodchild with sumptuous damasks, laces and silks. A vast golden bed looms large - the ultimate aspiration of almost every one of the sleazy characters for whom it symbolises lust, greed or merely social advancement.

And if Messrs Judge and Goodchild choose not to let us dwell on the grubbiness which lies behind all their clever talk, then there is still plenty to amuse and leave us feeling morally superior.

We do glimpse the moral squalor at the heart of the play in Christopher Godwin's lasciviously decrepit and poxy old gay groper, trembling with lust for Douglas Henshall's handsome young adventurer, while scheming to fix the lad up with his elder brother's fiancee.

The apotheosis of all this overbearing social and sexual ambition is the absurd Lord Foppington. A man who, having just spent a fortune acquiring a barony, is moved to declare: 'Tis an unspeakable pleas-ahh to a man of quah-lit-ay, strike me speechless. While I was a knight I w-ahs a very nauh-sous fellow ! Well, it's L10,000 well spent, stap me vitals !'

Victor Spinetti, in a towering periwig which looks as if he is being perpetually saveaged by a sheep, gives us the role's supercilious duplicity. In a voice pitched between Bette Davis at her most petulant and Loyd Grossman at his most unctuous, he teeters about in a permanent huff with life in general.

However, in keeping with the acceptable face of libidinous behaviour which underpins the production, he takes his cue for the role from Foppington's magnanimous final gesture, when he benignly relinquishes his claims on his feckless country heiress in favour of his equally feckless younger brother. There is the lurking suspicion that this Foppington is , indeed, the butt of his own vainglory. This makes the joke more humane and the character ultimately almost touching.

Susan Tracy's razor-sharp Berinthia is also allowed to assume the acceptable face of adultery by sharing a moment of fond feminine intimacy with the delightful Jennifer Ehle, the cousin whose husband she fully intends to bed.

Unusually for an Ian Judge enterprise, the production sometimes seems to lose any inner dramatic impetus. It is, nevertheless, a consistent visual delight and never less than entertaining, with the cleverest comic cameos coming from Shelia Steafel's overly maternal nurse and Christopher Benjamin's overweening country squire - his accent transposed from deepest Mummersest to darkest Lancashire, which somehow manages to add hugely to the hilarity.

 It's rare to find the Royal Shakespeare Company indulging in theatrical cosmetics - that's to say putting a light and wholesome face upon what really sports a pitted and rather disturbing complexion.

 But Ian Judge has just so prettified John Vanbrugh's last 17th century comedy, with its people pure as driven slush, compelled by the lures of sex, money and social-climbing.

 Judge's production resembles a boisterously farcial Christmas romp, with pantomime tendencies in the shape of Victor Spinetti's grossly got-up Lord Foppington, which achieves a happy ending.

 This old-fashioned approach comes as a bad surprise. For Vanbrugh's The Relapse, with its worldly, mellow cynicism and sexiness, was a calculated affront to the period's sentimental comedy in which rakes stopped raking and shaky marriages finally stood on their own four feet. Here, after all, in the play's key transaction, the widow Berinthia tries to set up her married cousin Amanda with Worthy, a young buck-about-town, so she herself may be left in peace to enjoy Loveless, Amanda's susceptible husband.

Berinthia, the spider at the web's centre, ought to be the comic epitome of hypocrisy which silkily masquerades as sophistication and modesty. But Miss Tracy - frankly now a touch too mature to be playing a youthful beauty - does not bring out the malign relish with which Berinthia conducts her power and sex game. Nor does she revel in her artful manipulations of Hugh Quarshie's jaded Loveless.

 And Michael Gardiner's Worthy, endangering the virtue of Jennifer Ehle's bemused Amanda, lacks nasty guile.

 The action on Tim Goodchild's cumbersomely unfunctional stage set, with chandeliers constantly raised and lowered, lacks speedy momentum.

 It is the marriage-making in the country while adultery prospers in town which works to delightful farcical effect.

 Christopher Benjamin's Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, an old walrus flailing out of his depth, Dougals Henshall as the suave marriage-prospector and the splendidly blunt Lorraine Ashbourne as his quarry, raise the comic temperature.

 But Lord Foppington, that model of narcissism, affectation and vanity, is converted by Victor Spinetti into a flaunting old pantomime queen: lurid with cosmetics, bewigged and bizarrely swaggering in red and purple.

 Ian Judge takes a breather from Shakespearean comedy to direct Sir John Vanbrugh's convoluted tale of sexual intrigue and dowry hunting, the kind of Restoration standard we've seen many times before in the Swan and would gladly see there many times again. After The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, and Twelfth Night, Judge is no slouch when it comes to ensemble casts, linguistic dexterity and period detail - though it's probably best to omit his tacky Christmas Carol from the equation. On this occasion he's gone for an earthier feel, typified by the double bed that gets hauled on stage after the prologue. An awful lot of activity goes on around this bed, from marital discord and girlish plotting to secret seduction and attempted rape. Here's hoping that the springs are oiled !

The subtitle of Vanbrugh's play is Virtue in Danger, though there's not a lot of virtue to worry about. Its main exponent is Amanda (a touching, intelligent Jennifer Ehle), who, having learned that bored husband Loveless (the excellent Hugh Quarshie, back in Stratford where he belongs) has committed adultery, must somehow resist the temptation to return the favour with dashing cad Mr. Worthy (Michael Gardiner). Amanda's dilemma is arranged by her cousin Berinthia (Susan Tracy), a defiantly merry widow with matching beauty spots on face and bosom whose fake outrage at Loveless' advances is just one of this sparkling production's many comic highpoints.

 The subplot concerns a devious scheme by one brother to marry the other's intended and collect her considerable fortune. Douglas Henshall gives an uncommonly drab performance as the cunning sibling; but given the competition, it's easy to see why. Not only must he confront Lorraine Ashbourne's gurning country wife Miss Hoyden, a gruesomely bewitching creature whose notion of allure involves arranging her arms like a poorly-assembled mannequin; he must also face Victor Spinetti's hilarious, scene-stealing Lord Foppington, an outrageously garbed popinjay whose knee-length periwig looks as if someone has accidentally dumped a ton of guano on his pate.

With endless cries of "Stap my vitals !" and "Strike me dumb !", this archetypal peacock tends to dominate the proceedings somewhat. But other actors still manage to make their mark, with Christopher Benjamin in fierce fettle as the choleric Sir Tunbelly Clumsey and Christopher Godwin ogling all and sundry as a manic matchmaker whose appetites have increased with age. Tim Goodchild's opulent designs and Jonathan Goldstein's sprightly score are just two more reasons to enjoy this show - while the beautifully choreographed curtain call is icing on the cake. Worth the trip !

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