Tracy-Ann Oberman, Alexander Hanson and Joseph Millson
(Picture: Nobby Clark)Forty-one years on, Michael Frayn’s peerless farce-within-a-farce is still guaranteed to leave an audience breathless with laughter, even though it has long outlived the sex comedies it set out to spoof in 1982. It’s meticulously plotted, remorselessly funny, and always feels fresh: last night, the jokes about tax dodging landed particularly soundly.
Lindsay Posner’s revival features precisely the kind of starry allsorts – Felicity Kendal, Matthew Kelly, Alexander Hanson – who might have taken a trouser-dropping farce out on the road in the Sixties or Seventies. It’s slow and curiously muted in the first act, when the troupe of vain and needy thesps stumble through rehearsals of a dire farce called Nothing On.
