Familiar to most as “the one with the bed-trick”, All’s Well That Ends Well has never found the popular favour of Shakespeare’s other Problem Plays. That this should be the new Globe’s first production is telling, a testimony to the work’s unsettling comedy, unlikeable hero, and the sheer density of its verbal contortions. In the hands of John Dove and his team, however, chafing edges are rounded, complexities untangled. The result is charming but callow, the smooth-cheeked younger brother of Shakespeare’s dark, adult comedy.

While Marianne Elliott’s 2009 production for the National Theatre (another institutional first) reworked the play’s folk-legend naivety into a Gothic, post-Angela Carter fairytale, shadows and wolves are made decidedly unwelcome here among the song and dance.

The seedier elements of the action also find themselves benched, with the actual business of the bed scene neatly omitted, and Bertram’s (Sam Crane) prejudice against his low-born would-be wife Helena (Ellie Piercy) more affected than actual — the posturing of an insecure youth fearful of his courtly standing.

It’s a shift in tone that makes heroes of blustering clown Parolles (James Garnon) and his comedic companions Lavatch (Colin Hurley) and Lafeu (a deliciously apoplectic Michael Bertenshaw). Strutting about in plumes and sashes, Garnon’s voluble wordsmith is truly a man whose “soul is his clothes”; shades of Rik Mayall’s Lord Flashheart leak out in his slick physical comedy, but there little room for pathos, for the tragedy that should colour his desperate insistence: “Simply the thing I am shall make me live.”

Dominating proceedings with her beautiful delivery and commanding warmth was Janie Dee’s Countess of Rousillon. All Home Counties efficiency and wryness (one suspected she might have a pair of wellingtons and a black Labrador concealed beneath her skirts), her performance had all the humanity and poise that was lacking in the young lovers.

Sadly neither Piercy nor Crane ever quite overcomes the artifice of their relationship, and neither rejection nor resolution brought much discernible life to Piercy’s self-sufficient heroine.

Unusually lovely even for the Globe, Michael Taylor’s designs set the drama against monochrome backdrops (unfathomably rural in theme despite the settings of court and city), picked out by stars in the latter acts, and atmosphere is further framed by William Lyons’s elegant musical leitmotifs. While Shakespeare’s text invites his audience to make a question out of the adage “All’s well that ends well”, this new production risks leaving it as a statement. Good humoured and uncomplicated, this is a show to delight summer audiences rather than scholars.

Until August 21. For tickets call 0207 401 9919 (www.shakespearesglobe.com).