Two Gentlemen of Verona @ Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

This very early, perhaps earliest, Shakespeare play is clearly an apprentice work and has never been popular. But committed to the staging over six years of the playwright’s entire oeuvre, the company would eventually have to bite the bullet. This production, directed by Stratford debutant Simon Godwin, is perhaps as good a job as could have been done.

The story, a markedly unpleasant one, begins when best friends Valentine (Michael Marcus) and Proteus (Mark Arends) are dispatched from Verona to pick up social polish in Milan.

In fact, the “tilts and tournaments” that Proteus’s dad Antonio (Keith Osborn) is led to expect for his son — by advisor Panthino (Simon Yadoo) — are replaced in this updated production by disco dancing and high fashion.

Amid the glitzy court of the Duke (Jonny Glynn), Valentine falls for his alluring (if somewhat ice-maidenish) daughter Silvia (Sarah Macrae), as does Proteus, despite the fact that his mate was there first and that he has a bird back home.

She is the faithful (and very foolish) Julia (Pearl Chanda) who puts on a man’s garb (becoming the Bard’s pioneer cross-dresser) to travel to Milan, where she arrives to hear her swain’s fervent declaration of love (firmly rejected) for Silvia.

Amazingly, all ends happily in scenes of sylvan reconciliation (pleasing woods from designer Paul Wills) which like so much else here — including Proteus’s revelatory soliloquies — hint at greater things to come in Shakespeare’s work.

Other soliloquies are supplied by Proteus’s man Launce (Roger Morlidge) — if droll words delivered in the presence of his dog Crab (the scene-stealing lurcher Mossup) can be so described.

His comic counterpoint is Valentine’s factotum Speed (Martin Bassindale), whose grating cheeky chappiness is suggested (but of course!) by his flat cap.

Two Gentlemen of Verona
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Until September 4
Box office: 0844 800 1110, rsc.org.uk