For Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee at the start of September 1769, a man was paid to warm up the crowd by shouting out extracts from Voltaire’s critique of Shakespeare. So that all would know that these words came from a Frenchman and not an Englishman meant to be celebrating the labours of a national poet, this impersonator was dressed in a cloak emblazoned with silver frogs. Since that day in 1769, I suspect that Voltaire has rarely come to life in a town now forever connected to Shakespeare, until, that is, Mark Ravenhill’s adaptation of Candide, performed by the RSC, which recently opened at the Swan theatre, almost 244 years to the day since the incident with the frog-covered cloak.

The play is billed as ‘inspired by Voltaire’, and functions as both a response to and updating of the original conte philosophique. The first scene is set in eighteenth-century Europe, at the home of an infatuated Duchess who wishes to awake Candide from a melancholy stupor and thus has him watch a play of his life so far. This proves too much for Candide, who breaks things off shortly after the Lisbon earthquake, announcing ‘I will change my story and make my fate.’ Scene two then throws us forward to ‘Sophie’s Birthday Party’, a gory family reunion where Sophie tells her entire family what she really thinks of them and of humanity in general. Scene three, ‘The Writer’, pushes the mise en abîme to its limit as various cinematic retellings of Sophie’s party, and its philosophical message, are imagined. Scene four returns us to Candide, this time free of the Duchess and marvelling at Eldorado. The play concludes with ‘The Pangloss Institute’, a scene set in 2032, when Pangloss announces that he has extracted from the cryogenically-frozen Candide a means of making the inhabitants of the entire world optimists.

As this short summary shows, Ravenhill’s play is no simple transfer from page to stage, and is all the richer for it. Each scene, as it lurches between past, present and future, offers new wonders for the audience, whether they be the staging of the Lisbon shipwreck that kills Jacques the Anabaptist, the dénouement of Sophie’s party or Candide’s escape from Eldorado. The production makes the most of the Swan Theatre’s technical capabilities, and demands a great deal of energy from the all-singing, all-dancing cast, many of whom play multiple parts.

It is hard to pick out individual performers for praise in this production, however, since Ravenhill’s text and Voltaire’s before it are both works more interested in ideas than character. Accordingly, this play is at its best when it comes closest to a philosophical cartoon, an impression helped along by the use of garish costumes in the eighteenth-century episodes, and stylized dress in the other scenes. Similarly, the lines spoken by the characters are rich in references to European literature, further drawing the audience into intellectual engagement as well as supporting Ravenhill’s endeavour to update and generalise the targets of Candide.

There are too many examples of such intertextuality to list, ranging from scattered references to Voltaire’s oeuvre, to the Writer’s speech on Shakespeare as suffering from bipolar disorder, all via many a partial quotation of the man from Stratford (‘would you commit the most unnatural act of all, self-slaughter?’ being, I suspect, one such thing). A speech from Cunegonde right at the end of the play resembles Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, and, paired with the Dedalus-like musings of the Writer, suggests Ravenhill had Joyce in mind when composing this play.

Talking to audience members after the performance, I found the intellectual wit of this production not to everyone’s taste. Perhaps this is because Candide is alien to the Elizabethan and Jacobean culture from which the RSC habitually draws its texts, and many theatre-goers were ill-prepared for its philosophical fireworks and cartoon extremism. This is not, however, the fault of Ravenhill, nor of the RSC, both having achieved the considerable feat of transferring the potent absurdity of the original – Voltaire’s deliberate uncoupling of tone and content – from the page to the stage. Performed in 105 minutes without interval, this play works to the extent that its energy and invention is able to enthral the audience, throwing them from one philosophical challenge to another like a rollercoaster.

With this in mind, one aspect of the play stands out for criticism. At two points in the text, once after Sophie’s party and once after Candide’s departure from Eldorado, Voltaire himself appears on stage and speaks lines drawn from his other works: such as L’homme aux quarante écus (1768) in Eldorado. This is appropriate enough, but makes for a shift of tone too abrupt to handle: it seemed as though, by the end of each spiel by Voltaire, the audience were no longer paying attention and were instead desperate to return to the next piece of over-the-top philosophical comedy. Allying lightness of tone with seriousness of content can work powerfully, but it can also be a prison, creating an environment in which, ironically enough, these segues fail to find many listeners and offer instead little more than a breather before the next display.

When Garrick staged Voltaire in 1769, he had the frog-emblazoned Frenchman accuse Shakespeare of writing ‘monstrous farces’ (a phrase first used in the Lettres philosophiques of the late 1720s), which is to say, plays which broke the unities of time, place and action, showed murder and much other unpleasantness on stage, and freely combined comedy and tragedy. It is with some irony, therefore, that Ravenhill’s staging of Candide itself has some of the elements Voltaire so disliked in Shakespeare’s plays. It too veers between the light and the serious, albeit in a way alien to Shakespeare’s works. Indeed, I might be tempted to call this production a ‘monstrous farce’ in its own right: it makes us laugh and yet it also, as it continues and updates Voltaire’s own attack on eighteenth-century optimism, shows us much that is monstrous. Just as the Stratford tourists did in 1769 therefore, I applaud this farce monstrueuse, and recommend it as an unusual and thought-provoking pleasure.

Mark Ravenhill’s Candide runs from 29th August to 26th October 2013 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.

This review was based on a preview performance of the play: the press night is set for 5th September 2013.