Directors have tried many means to explain Leontes’s jealous conviction of his wife’s infidelity that sets in motion the plot of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. A sudden fit of madness on his part is much the most popular. Sam Mendes takes a refreshingly different approach in his production for the Anglo/American Bridge Project which forms one half of a double bill (the other is Tom Stoppard’s new version of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard) now playing at London’s Old Vic. He shows us that the king (Simon Russell Beale) has very good reason to doubt Hermione.

The misunderstood “holy looks” between his queen (Rebecca Hall) and the Bohemian king Polixenes (Josh Hamilton), to which Leontes refers in the final scene of reconciliation, appear to be nothing of the sort as they are actually being delivered. Profane rather than sacred, they are of a piece with the “kissing with inside lip” and the other intimacies the furious monarch claims to have been observing.

Cleverly, this serves to make Leontes a more than usually sympathetic figure. So does the (distinctly unregal) nervous nerdishness he brings to the role and the intermittent tenderness he shows to the swaddled newborn princess before consigning her, in a final fit of resolution, to her fate on the dangerous shores of Bohemia.

This scene of emotional turmoil proves the high point of this hugely entertaining production, with Russell Beale sparring brilliantly with another of the British stage’s greatest actors, Sinead Cusack (pictured), as Paulina, the forceful protector of the baby girl and of her mother’s good name.

But it is far from an outright victory to the ‘home side’, with the American performers – who take, with Transatlantic accents intact, the roles of the leading Bohemian characters – far from being outclassed. There is a first-class turn, for instance, from screen star Ethan Hawke who transforms the roguish pickpocket Autolycus into a guitar-playing minstrel and, later, into a character resembling Johnny Depp’s Caribbean pirate. His repeated gulling of the Young Shepherd – a fine comic performance from Tobias Segal – is a joy to behold. In another clever touch, Richard Easton’s Old Shepherd – father to the aforementioned – is given the look of a Native American tribal chief.

Meanwhile, the abandoned baby Perdita (Morven Christie) has grown up to speak, as she logically would, with the ‘Bohemian’ (ie American) accent. Her love affair with young Florizel (Michael Braun), cemented at a merry hoe-down beneath a wide prairie sky (designs Anthony Ward), will delight all but the veriest curmudgeon.

The Winter’s Tale continues until . August 15. For tickets telephone 0844 871 7628 (or www.oldvictheatre.com).