One of the director's tasks is to help the actors free the comedy from the page, and to make lines funny when they often seem to depend on footnotes to be fully comprehensible. But one of the great discoveries of working on any Shakespeare play, especially with a company of outstanding comedians, is that the Bard, rather like Falstaff, is not only witty in himself, but 'the cause that wit is in other men'.

The characters in both works are often quite broadly comic, but they are all rooted in psychological truth. The key to unlocking the comedy, I think, is to treat them as real people.

I always felt that with Dogberry and Moth the comedy sprang from Shakespeare's observational skills as much as from the brilliance of the language.

Dogberry is memorable for his linguistic slips, and liberal use of malapropisms (we should probably call them Dogberryisms - he anticipated Mrs Malaprop by nearly 200 years). But this only really becomes genuinely amusing when we start to think about why he has such a tenuous hold on words.

Painfully insecure, promoted beyond his capabilities and struggling hard to justify his status ('I am an officer; and, which is more, a householder…'), and possibly, in our setting, suffering from shell shock, he becomes a heartbreakingly fallible police constable.

Moth may seem, initially, to be an infuriatingly precocious 'page', but in a country house setting it's easy to see him as a self-taught hall boy, ransacking the library for classical references and striking up an unlikely friendship with an eccentric houseguest, the bohemian Don Armado.

As with so many relationships in Shakespeare, these two only really come alive when the class boundaries are distinct – readily delineated in an Edwardian household.