In fact it’s a shade under fifty years on for this revival of Alan Bennett’s 1968 breakthrough play, which uses a public school as an emblem for England as it engages in a hotch-potch revue of the twentieth century featuring all the old-skool (ha) national virtues and vices. However, the production also looks forward in several ways. This is Chichester’s first production under its new artistic director Daniel Evans. Evans was a class act running the theatres in Sheffield, and one expects him here to follow a similar path to his predecessor Jonathan Church: cannily mixing more traditional productions to appeal to Chichester’s conservative core audience with other ventures that push the envelope. Evans’ next bit of programming comes from his forte of musical theatre, being Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, Or Change.

Even here, musical director Tom Brady gets to cut loose repeatedly: not only does the bill of fare run from a Flying Pickets-style a capella “I Vow To Thee, My Country” to a school-choir-and-solo-tap-dancer rendition of Thirties novelty number “Little Sir Echo”, but he and Evans have 50-odd members of Chichester’s youth theatre to flesh out their arrangements and choreography.

As the outgoing headmaster, Richard Wilson would seem ideally irascible casting. Unfortunately, at this point his fangs are still drawn by a surreptitious yet noticeable reliance on half-hidden copies of the script. On press night we repeatedly saw the Wilsonian head of steam building, only to dissipate with a glance at the order of service or the headmaster’s own pages in the entertainment (cheekily disguising the script as a script, but a different script... sort of...). Alan Cox utilises his knack for deadpanning absurdity as the director and star of the revue, and Jenny Galloway as Matron has a couple of  nicely understated segments.

Bennett has always been fundamentally ambivalent about Englishness, interrogating and lampooning it without ever loosening his embrace of it. In 1968, I suspect the net effect of this play would have been to deflate some myths still held too dearly when World War Two was fresh in memory; in the Brexit Britain of 2017, eager to deny its knowingness and reconnect with old archetypes – and, yes, I have to say, particularly in Chichester – I fear it serves more to reinflate them.

Written for the Financial Times.