When She Stoops To Conquer opens tonight at Nottingham Playhouse, the 18th-century comedy will be gussied up with some modern, or maybe postmodern, conceits and flourishes.

But according to the people bringing it to the stage, beneath that stands a play which endures where so many of its Georgian contemporaries have not by offering real, fully-drawn characters beneath its freewheeling comedy.

The play's comically convoluted plot revolves around two pairs of thwarted lovers, mistaken identities and humour about ideas of class and station. It debuted in 1773, and not many plays from that era still get much of an airing.

Director Lucy Pitman-Wallace and Chris Nayak, who plays bumbling troublemaker Tony Lumpkin, note that the play benefits from more than just thinly drawn frivolity. Chris cites "these great big bold characters that are really well drawn" as reason for the play's enduring success, as well as the fact that there's a strong thread of romance running under the comic plot. There is, he notes, a strong hint of Romeo and Juliet to the two lead characters, Kate Hardcastle and Charles Marlow.

Lucy also views the real emotion behind the chaos as central to the play's popularity. "There's a real sense of a love story ... there's a real sense of two people falling in love," she says.

It's about foibles people in any era can relate to – how people behave in different circumstances. Protagonist Charles chats up barmaids, but he's intimidated by women he sees as social equals. He behaves differently in a public situation than in private. Today, the upstairs-downstairs element might just be replaced by a man who's more comfortable chatting to women on the internet.

"The other thing that makes it such fun," Lucy says, "is the fact there's such a strong female role in there. That makes it attractive to a modern audience."

That would be Kate, the high-born heroine who impersonates a barmaid to find out what Charles, her potential beloved, is really like.

"Sometimes with these older plays there is a sense that the girl is a bit wet, a bit doormat-like, and she absolutely isn't," Lucy says. "She's a fun, feisty girl who gets the man she loves."

So the play offers tales from the 1770s that still relate to modern audiences. But alongside that sits some staging that's modern in idea, if not in look, and that furthers the humour.

The play's central conceit is that these are actors – an 18th-century troupe – performing a production of She Stoops To Conquer. Lucy found that appropriate for a play where characters act as if they know they're in a play and often speak in comic asides to the audience.

Now, they're doing more than just addressing the punters.

"They provide the music on stage so we've got two fiddles and a cello, and there are a few moments where the company sings," Lucy says.

The play's not a musical as a modern audience would know it, but playwright Oliver Goldsmith wrote a few songs into it. In the original script Kate Hardcastle has a big number. But the woman playing Kate for the 1773 debut couldn't do it, so the song got dropped.

Their Kate, Ellie Beavan, will sing it to new music (the original music having been lost).

The actors even make special-effects noises, radio-style – a tray of gravel on the ground representing footsteps up the path, etc.

"I think the actors have all really enjoyed it – they are really getting into it," Lucy says of those unconventional moves.

"It was that thing of saying it's OK. If you're doing a very slick modern-day sort of play they might not be comfortable with the conceit."

Here, she says, "it was making a virtue of the fact that the audience will see what's going on".

Well, most of the time.

Some of the changes into complicated period costumes happen quite quickly, so the behind-the-scenes conceit did need to have some limits, Lucy says.

"You can't exactly have somebody standing around in their modern-day pants."

She Stoops To Conquer runs at Nottingham Playhouse from tonight until September 18. Tickets are £7.50 to £26.50 from the box office, call 0115 941 9419 or go to www.nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk.