David Korins' design, which at first seems just another applause-worthy set of a country house somewhere in the north of England (stone fireplace, mounted antlers, tapestries, firelight glowing), turns out to be the linchpin of the plot when, in the first moments of Act 1, Mrs. Hardcastle (Kristine Nielsen) complains to her husband (Paxton Whitehead), "Here we live in an old rambling mansion that looks for all the world like an inn. . . ."

And sure enough, when two London gentlemen come courting the Hardcastles' daughter, they mistake the house for an inn, their host for an innkeeper, and Kate (Jessica Stone) for a barmaid.

And we're off.

The plot is the usual folderol: Marlow (John Patrick Walker) is the arrogant city slicker who is too bashful to talk to women of his own class (and thus Kate is She Who Stoops to Conquer). The cause of the mix-ups and the solver of the mix-ups is her prankster stepbrother, the well-named Tony Lumpkin (Brooks Ashmanskas). Mrs. Hardcastle's niece (Rebecca Brooksher) and her beau (Jeremy Webb) are the second-banana couple - all smooth, blond, and high-minded, the perfect foils to their far more interesting friends.

There is a legacy of jewels; there are escapes and returns, spats and forgivings. The cast's comic timing is just about flawless (Ashmanskas' is particularly good), and their voices (especially Stone's) are quirky and can roam up, down, and sideways.

The costumes (designed by Gabriel Berry) are a show in themselves: Mrs. Hardcastle's immense dresses are pink confections (to match her pinkified blond hair), while the two young women wear nifty combinations of plaids. The buttons! The trimming! The curls!

As Marlow says, "A modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation." And so it is that the costumes, as well as the set, are the plot's pivot, since Mr. Hardcastle, an old-fashioned man opposed to London fashion and foolishness, insists that if his daughter wears her finery during the day, she wear peasant dress at night, and so, "The Mistakes of a Night" (the play's subtitle) pile up.

Goldsmith's essay on comedy makes this point: "It is not easy to recover an art when once lost; and it will be but a just punishment, that when, by our being too fastidious, we have banished humor from the stage, we should ourselves be deprived of the art of laughing."

Fastidiousness certainly isn't the problem nowadays, but snarkiness may be: She Stoops to Conquer is old-fashionedly funny, with a happy ending guaranteed.

She Stoops to Conquer

At the McCarter Theater,

91 University Place, Princeton, through Nov. 1.

Information: 610-258-2787 or www.mccarter.org.