Paul Hunter is probably Britain’s finest actor in the clowning style, precisely because clowning isn’t the end of it. He can take a fall, get his foot stuck in a bucket or spout nonsense – all of which he does in the course of the present 75-minute piece – but all in the service of material that is poignant, even sombre, at the same time as being absurd. It has been the keynote of Hunter’s company Told By An Idiot throughout its quarter-century of existence and shows no sign of being abandoned.

Hunter and his fellow performer here, Ayesha Antoine (who plays everyone except Napoleon), have collaborated with guest director Kathryn Hunter to create what is sometimes an adaptation of, sometimes a series of riffs upon, the late Belgian-Australian Simon Leys’ 1986 novella The Death Of Napoleon (also filmed in 2001 as The Emperor’s New Clothes). Bonaparte escapes from exile on St Helena by switching places with a lookalike deckhand and, not without difficulty, makes his way back to Paris where, unable to reveal himself (at least, unable to do so plausibly), he forges a life with an unsuccessful fruit-seller.

The trademark inventiveness and silliness are well to the fore in the opening phase: Hunter first appears as the floor manager of an edition of University Challenge, and the voyage back from St Helena shows off Michael Vale’s ingenious design, which sets the entire stage on a set of enormous rockers so that it can pitch as if at sea. (Later, when Napoleon rocks a baby to sleep, it is the whole stage that moves while the crib remains flat on its boards.)

The deeper heft of Leys’ work, however, does not come through reliably. True, we see the former emperor uncertain of his new role in terms of France, the melon-seller nicknamed “Ostrich” or even of himself as an individual; but the whimsy of the style does not subside sufficiently for this aspect to assume its full status. It feels like added-value profundity rather than part of the essence of the piece. Even a comparative throwaway from Told By An Idiot is worth watching, but this is more throwaway than it would like to be.

Written for the Financial Times.