DESPITE coming off the back of his successful productions of The Play What I Wrote, The Ladykillers and Joe Orton’s What The Butler Saw, director Sean Foley admits the Royal Shakespeare Company weren’t so keen on his first choice of comedy to direct for them.

“I saw the title A Mad World My Masters and thought it sounded good,” he says of the original production which was performed at Stratford’s Swan Theatre. “I read the play and told them ‘This is what I want to do’. They weren’t sure as nobody knew it – they asked whether I wanted to do The Merry Wives Of Windsor instead!”

What attracted Foley to the 17th-century play was simple – the comedy.

“A lot of comedies written around then are treated far too reverentially,” he says. “They are great literature, but first and foremost they are comedy plays and you have got to present them as such.

“With Shakespeare’s comedies there used to be 2,000 people down The Globe laughing their heads off.”

The touring version of Thomas Middleton’s play, which sees many of the original cast return, is a “full-on comedy experience”.

“There are so many wonderful comic situations and great characters,” says Foley. “A lot of comedies will have one proper joke every five minutes, with this it’s one a minute, if not more.

“The audience has the best time they can have in the theatre.”

He was surprised that the piece, which sees a group of disparate amoral characters go all out to either make as much cash as they can or get their end away, isn’t better known.

“I think it was last done about 15 years ago, but reading the reviews it didn’t go down brilliantly,” he says.

“I think we have put it on the map – it had almost been lost. Those themes of sex and money are always in fashion – it’s quite naughty in a fun way.”

For his revival Foley decided to move the action to the glamour and danger of 1950s Soho.

“We were originally thinking of doing it in the early 1960s around the Profumo scandal,” he says. “Instead we went for just before that. The characters in the play are much more like people from the 1950s – where a woman’s place was in the home and nobody talked about sex. It’s a good fit.

“We were able to add an extra element with the jazz blues band and a fantastic singer. There are songs throughout the show – as there were in the original text.”

The 1950s setting also helped with some of the more fantastical moments in the play.

“Once you have found an appropriate setting everything happens naturally,” he says. “In one section a very religious character is in lust with one of his parishioners.

“After he does the deed he’s full of guilt and remorse – so much so he has this mad vision of a devil appear to him.

“In our version she’s a burlesque dancer, as you might see in a naughty club in 1950s Soho.”

A Mad World My Masters is Foley’s first 17th-century play, but not his first foray into the early 20th century, having directed the original West End version of the brilliant Jeeves And Wooster play Perfect Nonsense, set in the 1930s and starring Stephen Mangan and Matthew Macfadyen.

And the RSC has clearly been impressed by what he has done with A Mad World My Masters – approaching him to reimagine Ben Johnson’s classic comedy The Alchemist next.

“It looks like I’ve got to do another 400-year- old comedy!” he says.

“They are brilliant plays, but still need a lot of care and work to be brought to life – they were laugh-out-loud comedies and that is what they should still be.”

A Mad World My Masters, Theatre Royal Brighton, New Road, Tuesday, March 10 to Saturday, March 14, starts 7.30pm, 2.30pm matinees Thurs to Sat, tickets from £11.90. Call 08448 717650.