‘Ahandbag?” Uttered with explosive incredulity down the decades, there can be few more momentous words in any play than those spoken by Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest when she learns that, as a baby, Jack Worthing was discovered in a handbag left in the cloakroom at Victoria Railway Station.

But how does the imperious and very English Lady Bracknell go down with a Russian audience? Very well apparently, as Oxford’s Tomahawk Theatre Company discovered when it took its production of Earnest to Russia. “They loved her,” Tomahawk’s Rachel Johnson told me. “She just comes off the page: a few of the students told us that encountering Lady Bracknell was just what they imagined it would be like if they met the Queen!”

But how did Tomahawk come to be performing in Russia in the first place?

“We had a contact in Taganrog, which is a peaceful, tree-lined university city in southern Russia. One day we said to this contact: ‘Would you like some theatre?’ And she said: ‘Why not?’ She’s one of those ladies you meet in life that makes things happen. So we condensed The Importance of Being Earnest down to an hour and fifteen minutes.”

Just like that?

“Yes, just like that! We’d previously taken the play to Italy, so we had a lot of things prepared already. We wrote our version in a week, and performed it for students at the university. It was an interactive presentation, which started off telling the audience about Oxford and its University, then introduced Oscar Wilde. Tomahawk’s founder, Alex Nicholls, did a great speech, and Lady Bracknell interrupted him — in costume.

“We helped the students sit correctly, showed them how to drink tea in the proper manner, and taught them how to walk about with books on their heads. We just introduced them to the world of the play, and got them up on stage. We also did some dancing for them — we have a very good choreographer. Generally, we went round the university, and also schools, promoting Anglo-Russian relations.”

Rachel Johnson and I were talking at Oxford Castle, where Tomahawk is about to stage Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Rachel is directing the production, and her enthusiasm for the job is very evident.

“I have a company of very good actors: we’re incredibly lucky, people who’ve worked with Tomahawk have gone on to train at RADA, LAMDA, and so on, and they’ve ended up going into the business as professional actors. Our cast members are all very open to ideas, and very versatile. Some of them have appeared with us before, some are new.

“We are having a lot of fun with the play. We start by playing around with what it would be like to show the characters as absolute caricatures — Sir Toby Belch, for example. We get that out of our systems a little bit. But we hold on to whatever actually really works.

“It’s the same with Malvolio: we’ve tried to make him very, very real. This has been a challenge, because it’s easy to come up with cheap gimmicks all the time. We’ve depicted him as more of a tragic character rather than as a figure of fun – although, of course, the scenes involving his yellow stockings can’t fail to be hilarious.”

As we sat on the steps just below the Castle Mound, and alongside the Education Centre, we looked down on the paved area that will form Tomahawk’s stage. The sun shone down, and it was altogether an idyllic scene. But, of course, beautiful Oxford doesn’t always come up with beautiful weather. What, I asked Rachel, will happen if it rains?

“If we know we are going to have to cancel a show in advance for any reason, then we will contact people. Full refunds will be available, but we hope people will decide to come another night — for the first time, we have a two-week run. If it starts raining during the show, we’ll take ten minutes, and see how it goes.”

Meanwhile, Rachel is hard at work with rehearsals. But would there be room for just one more actor, someone with a very loud voice? As we talked, we were regularly interrupted by a cockerel who was strutting about down below.

“I’ve never seen or heard him before,” Rachel laughed. But she didn’t seem too keen on offering him a part — maybe she’s heard all those stories about the dangers of working with children and animals . . .

n Twelfth Night runs in the Oxford Castle Courtyard from June 22 – July 3. Tickets: www.ticketsoxford.com or 01865 305305.