Not content with adapting and directing Eugène Labiche’s 1863 farce, Jeremy Sams has also composed a clutch of light musical numbers to punctuate it. Labiche was the first of the great French farceurs, the forerunner to Feydeau, and Sams’ sense of humour is both broad enough and buoyant enough to make this rendering a real treat.

This is not a filthy, series-of-compromising-positions farce (although the protagonist is at one point caught giving a male friend a vigorous coccygeal massage). It is not his present but his past activities that threaten Celimare: on his wedding day and thereafter, he is constantly intruded upon by two neighbours, each of whom he has cuckolded in times gone by. The problem of getting rid of them whilst keeping these secrets from his wife, in-laws and each from the other husband is what drives the action and the humour. Howard Ward’s Bocardon is all energetic bonhomie, Gregory Gudgeon’s Vernouillet a tedious, maudlin widower. Bocardon’s wife, too, keeps threatening from offstage to spill the beans, adding another running gag: will we ever actually see her?

Raymond Coulthard makes Celimare the kind of farce protagonist who shares knowing asides with the audience but still convinces us that everything is at stake for him. He simply can’t resist it: when it’s remarked of Mme Bocardon “She hasn’t been feeling herself”, the merest glance at us is enough to signal “No, but I know who soon will be.” In addition to Coulthard’s skill, this shows Sams’: as adapter, he can include an old chestnut such as “My wife had a cockatoo”, whilst as director he can move on from it so swiftly that we don’t get derailed by nudge-nudgery. Polly Sullivan’s design honours the spirit of farce with 13 separate entrances/exits on two sets on the Ustinov’s compact stage, yet without Sams feeling obliged to use more than a few. And, as often in classical farces, the sexual dimension turns out to be of secondary importance to social or in this case financial considerations. A glorious soufflé of a production, the kind that will convert folk who think they dislike farce.

Written for the Financial Times.