Well, after the encore I think I’m now excused banjos for the rest of my life. Surprisingly, the old kerplunker was not written into the 1963 musical solely for the benefit of original star Tommy Steele; the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ Kipps: The Story Of A Simple Soul (1905) is himself an unregenerate plucker. And this version at least gets a lot of mileage out of it, including a second-act number set at a society soiree which ends with one chap literally swinging from the chandelier.

A few of David Heneker’s songs have been cut, with the remainder re-ordered, re-purposed and augmented by new numbers by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe; Beverley Cross’s script has been replaced with one by Julian Fellowes. (This is the team that gussied up Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of Mary Poppins a few years ago, and will this autumn unveil a new musical version of The Wind In The Willows.)

The creator of Downton Abbey is a natural choice for an Edwardian story about class consciousness: draper’s assistant Arthur Kipps comes into money and has to choose between shabby-genteel Helen with her appallingly snobbish family and childhood friend Ann. Whichever way the story resolves itself, it’s going to feel dodgy in 2016: it will either peddle the myth of social mobility or suggest that happiness lies in knowing one’s place. Wells opted for the latter, with which I suspect milord Fellowes is more instinctively in sympathy. His script is fluent, though not without a clutch of the anachronistic turns of phrase for which he is known in some quarters. The songs are for the most part jaunty, to say the least (this is the show that gave us “Flash, Bang, Wallop”), with the new Stiles & Drewe numbers fitting well amidst the repointed originals.

Rachel Kavanaugh directs stylishly, and in Charlie Stemp has a lead actor as given to a bit of a vigorous cavort as was the young Tommy Steele. It’s fluff, of course, and the kind of fluff whose appeal largely depends on whether or not you buy the kind of social complacency in which even a fervent Marxist character dreams of nothing so much as his own small business.

Written for the Financial Times.