Tony Turner has a long relationship with She Stoops to Conquer. One of his research areas at the Australian National University was 18th century theatre – "I've been teaching the play for 18 years" – and he directed a production with students there nearly two decades ago.

"We go back a long way, the play and me."

Now he's revisiting what he calls "one of the most significant comedies in the history of English theatre", directing Oliver Goldsmith's 1773 play She Stoops to Conquer as the fourth production in Canberra Repertory Society's 2016-17 season.

Why is it so significant?

Turner says that after Shakespeare, by the early 18th century, English theatrical comedy had fallen into what was called sentimental comedy – a genteel, moral kind that raised smiles rather than provoked laughter.

"It was the culture of the time, the feeling of the time, they felt that laughter was not right," Turner says.

At the behest of the writer and critic Dr Samuel Johnson, Goldsmith set out to write a play that would make people laugh – Johnson feared unless something changed, English comedy could die. Thus, She Stoops to Conquer was created.

"This is the first of Goldsmith's comedies and the first dubbed 'laughing comedies'," Turner says. The play was very successful and other writers began following with works in similar vein.

"It was very closely followed by The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar in the same style."

She Stoops to Conquer, Turner says, was and remains popular because it contains many of the elements comedies have long made use of, including mistaken identities, the class system and the relationships between servants and masters.

"This particular play seems to crystallise all of that," Turner says.

In She Stoops to Conquer, Charles Marlow (played by George Pulley) and his friend George Hastings (Teig Sadhana) are travelling to meet Kate Hardcastle (Zoe Priest), whom it is intended Charles will marry. But Charles is so ill at ease among high-class ladies he cannot speak to them, though he has no such problem with servant women; when the well-bred Kate discovers this she decides to pose as a maid, "stooping to conquer" her man. But that's not the only deception in the play: early on, at an alehouse, Charles and George encounter Kate's stepbrother, Tony Lumpkin (Adam Salter), who plays a joke on them by telling them they are a long way from the Hardcastle home and will have to spend the night at an inn.

"He's a rogue and devil, the clown of the play," Turner says of Lumpkin. "He's the low comedy; he does a lot of manipulating."

The "inn" he directs them to is, in fact, the Hardcastles' home. Not knowing this, they treat Kate's father, Mr Hardcastle (Jonathan Pearson) and the house's other inhabitants quite disdainfully.

Meanwhile, George Hastings has a love of his own to pursue in Constance Neville (Kate Harris) – a relationship that proves to have its own complications.

More than 200 years after its premiere, She Stoops to Conquer continues to be performed – Turner recalls seeing a performance featuring Patricia Routledge, famous as Hyacinth Bucket in the TV sitcom Keeping Keeping Up Appearances, – and he attributes this to one simple reason: "It's funny."

Not, he says, that it's intended to be realistic and he's kept it 18th century in its setting and costumes and acting style to reflect this artificiality.

"Stanislavsky was almost 150 years away," he says, wryly adding that when actors ask about their motivations in a scene all he can say is that Goldsmith has written in it the script for it to happen.

"We're living in an age of realism," he says. But in She Stoops to Conquer, realism was never the idea. Although it essentially observes the classical unities of time, place and action Aristotle deemed necessary for drama, taking place over one day in a relatively confined setting and without too many subplots, the play was intended, as noted earlier, to make people laugh. And that it has been doing for more than two centuries.