We are talking here not of Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro but the 1784 play by the French dramatist Beaumarchais, on which it is based. Premiered on the British stage as recently as 1974, it remains little seen in this country. The Watermill’s rollicking new production uses a script by Ranjit Bolt, which trims the action to fit into a running time of a shade under two hours.

In keeping with what is now the Watermill tradition, actors double as musicians, though not in every case. Those who play are not especially taxed by Sarah Travis’s score. But music is not often absent: snatches of the opera will come unbidden to the brains of those who know it well, as the familiar action proceeds. A few bars of the overture played at the beginning make a comparison inevitable. It is instructive to see how closely librettist da Ponte stuck to the original.

For fans of the opera, the biggest surprise is to find that Bolt has eliminated the characters of Marcellina and Dr Bartolo, and with them the revelation of Figaro’s parentage. But there remains almost all of the comic action relating to the attempts of the randy Count (Philip Bird) to have his way with Figaro’s intended, the lovely Suzanne (Ruth Everett), and the successful efforts of the wily valet to prevent this. Meanwhile, the Countess (given a richly comic performance by Rachel Atkins) is about her own amorous adventures involving the precocious Cherubin, who is presented in suitably cheeky style by Liam Bergin, EastEnders’ Danny Mitchell.

Amid all the speedy comic action, well-managed under director Kate Saxon, it had started to seem by the interval that we were to see nothing of the play’s serious side. I refer to the pointed comments on class that made it such dangerous material when it was written, just before the French Revolution. Then, from Jason Baughan’s admirable Figaro (pictured right with Suzanne), comes the famous questioning of his master’s right to live as he does, the daring accusation that he has gained his fortune simply for being born who he was.

After this volatile stuff, farce continues — with audience and cast now out in the Watermill’s lovely garden — in the night-time comedy of mistaken identities.

Until July 30. Tickets: www.watermill.org.uk or 01635 46044.