Eighteen months ago, The Play That Goes Wrong completed its ascent from post-student fringe show to West End hit. It is still running, and is now joined – at the former home of the spoof version of The 39 Steps which had been one of the company’s inspirations – by... well, you can’t accuse Mischief Theatre of titling their offerings misleadingly. Just as The Play That... is a deliberate example of the art of coarse acting (what the late theatre maverick Ken Campbell called “doing it crappily”), so The Comedy About... utilises all the skills honed for the earlier show in a slightly more conventional context: virtually all the chaos is in the tale itself rather than the performance.

And by gum, they take their comedy seriously. It’s a rare occasion when three seconds pass without a gag of some description. However, this isn’t an unambiguous plus point. A few minutes after the opening fusillade of Airplane!-style punning literalisms (e.g. “Neil!”, and everybody does), during a protracted cousin of the old “who’s on first” routine, I began to feel that the company were trying much too hard. The central scene, which is pure farce, contains not one but three compromising-position moments, which is surely overdoing things. And yet, after the interval, during a perspective-shift sequence in which we seem to be looking down on characters from overhead as actors are roped against the back wall, I finally had to concede that this is a show that does not merely go through funny and out the other side, but right round in curved space and back into funny again.

It’s the range of comic ideas that is so undeniably impressive: verbal, physical, visual, and ranging from classical to postmodern in style. Proceedings, set in the 1950s, are led by the three co-writers: Henry Shields is Mitch Ruscitti, the escaped con who masterminds (ahem) the robbery of the Minneapolis City Bank managed by burly, manic Henry Lewis as Robin Freeboys (“Robbin’ three boys?”), and with Jonathan Sayer as put-upon sexagenarian intern Warren. Charlie Russell also excels as Caprice, Freeboys’ gold-digging daughter with a heart. It all adds up to one of those cheerfully defiant shows that refuse to let you not like them.

Written for the Financial Times.