BANG! With shocking suddenness, the doors were flung open by a liveried pair and in swept a magnificent personage - only Trivelin, the Prince's manservant, as it turned out.
A starting pistol couldn't have brought the audience at the Gate Theatre's The Cheating Hearts to attention more smartly. The play was on and so, from those first galvanising moments, was the heat. How was Pierre Marivaux's comedy performed in 1723? A little laboriously, with much slapstick, one would guess. Britain's Gate Theatre bursts into action and the pace never slackens.
Neither does the attention to detail. Even the lift of an ironic eyebrow has a deliberateness verging on choreography, yet director Laurence Boswell largely avoids contrivance in this hugely entertaining period piece.
In Ranjit Bolt, he has an inspired translator. Harlequin, the yokel, may utter a few asides like ''bollocks!'' but setting and sentiments belong firmly to the age of hooped skirts and barbed witticisms.
As in Dangerous Liaisons, seduction is central to The Cheating Hearts, but here the motivation is love and there are morals to be digested, even by the most cynical and gluttonous.
Can Silvia and Harlequin survive the machinations of those arch-sophisticates? Will the Prince and that consummate temptress Flaminia triumph? What fun the Gate provides before all is resolved.