Topical gags, working the audience non-stop and addressing individual punters directly, interpolated musical numbers, onstage corpsing, outrageous costumes and drag... Yes, all the traditional ingredients of pantomime are present and correct. Which is probably a bit much for a play by Molière.

I’m normally unstinting in my praise of Sean Foley as a director of comedy, but not in this case. Foley wants to catch the exuberant spirit of the 17th-century French playwright’s comedy rather than err on the side of unfunny reverence, and his claim is true that this revival is more faithful than it looks. Even so, I can’t dismiss the feeling that he and co-adapter Phil Porter (whose own tribute to Plautus, from whom Molière nicked this plot, will be staged by the RSC in May) have thrown in not just the kitchen sink but a full range of domestic porcelainware.

Giving the title character Harpagon’s son and daughter respectively an outrageous lisp and equally (mis)pronounced rhotacism takes us straight to the Pontius Pilate routine in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, and is tactless when the guy playing son Cléante’s valet is revealed to have a slight but genuine lisp. When Harpagon’s intended, and Cléante’s beloved, Marianne (Ellie White), affects a wild contemporary-patrician drawl in which every single vowel is “ah”, you begin to wonder if anyone onstage will speak at all normally.

Griff Rhys-Jones, making his first stage appearance in yonks as Harpagon, does so. Phonetically normally, that is, but more scabrously than I’ve ever heard him. I’m a staunch defender of swearing both onstage and off, but there are still times and places where it feels wrong, and so constantly in Rhys-Jones’s gob is one of them. Mathew Horne seems constricted as Harpagon’s daughter’s suitor: all military mannerisms and none of the fluidity which is his strength. The triumphant exception is Lee Mack, whose role as the servant Maître Jacques in his first theatrical appearance has been expanded to take advantage of his persona as stand-up comic, TV presenter/panellist and in his own sitcom Not Going Out. He works both audience and material a treat, and with the apparent effortlessness which (belying a keen precision beneath) is the usual hallmark of Foley’s comic enterprises; here, though, it repeatedly feels as if almost everyone is trying much too hard.

Written for the Financial Times.