William Goldman’s famous Hollywood maxim “Nobody knows anything” dates from half a century later, but might have been the motto of George S Kaufman and Moss Hart’s first stage comedy collaboration in 1930. It tells of three small-time vaudevilleans who go west to break into moving pictures just as the talkie era is born; two of them are hucksters of differing kinds, but it is the third, a holy fool for whom things keep going insanely and inexplicably right, who really makes his mark in the authoritarian Glogauer Studios.

Kaufman & Hart’s Hollywood (as revised by Hart’s son Christopher) is a frantic place where nobody, indeed, knows anything but everybody is chasing something pell-mell. It’s puzzling, then, how absent the frenzy and chaos are from Richard Jones’ production. It makes sense for the rather dim guru-by-accident George to remain comparatively unflapped whilst all explodes around him, and John Marquez brings an innocent calm to the role reminiscent of Mark Rylance at the centre of the sexual shenanigans in Boeing-Boeing. However, Kevin Bishop’s Jerry seems assured rather than keen to hustle, and impressively sardonic though Claudie Blakley’s performance as self-declared elocution expert May is, it’s often somewhat at odds with her insight into the precarious nature of the whole place. A playwright who suffers an onstage breakdown in frustration here seldom even raises his voice, and the role of the tyrannical studio head Glogauer is something of a waste for Harry Enfield in his theatrical début. Enfield is so under-directed that he falls back on the kind of two-armed gestures characteristic of an inexperienced actor, belying his thirty-plus years of acting chops, albeit in character comedy on stage and screen rather than theatre as such.

Hyemi Shin’s revolving design is clever, but rather gives the game away that this is a 21st-century caricature of 1920s settings. Jones’s staging, too, suggests that his idea of our own age is that it does not, perhaps cannot, get too excited about anything. With a little more oomph and the tactical deployment of an extra ten decibels or so, this could elicit guffaws rather than chuckles.

Written for the Financial Times.