It may be Michael Frayn’s and Alan Ayckbourn’s fault. The success of the latter’s A Chorus Of Disapproval and in particular the former’s Noises Off have rather led us to assume that a backstage play must be a comedy. Thus they have complicated the posterity of The Dresser by Ronald Harwood, which premièred just a few years earlier in 1980 and is more muted and tragicomic.

It’s easy to see the appeal of such a project to director Sean Foley and actor Reece Shearsmith, each established as a skilled comic talent and keen to show that their respective palettes are broader. Shearsmith plays Norman, dresser and general dogsbody to “Sir”, an actor-laddie of the old school now leading a third-rate company during World War Two in endless tours of Shakespeare through towns unnoticed except by Luftwaffe bombers. We follow the company, principally in Sir’s dressing room but also in the wings thanks to Michael Taylor’s wonderful manually revolving set, through a day which sees his 277th performance as King Lear, a fatalistic mental crisis and... well, if you don’t already know the ending, you can surely guess.

Shearsmith begins by giving full rein to the key of bitchy camp in which Harwood has written Norman. It’s a nicely detailed performance – when he mentions Othello he simply draws a circle in the air around his head to allude to the matter of blackface acting – but it may be modulated too little to gird us for the emotional complexities to come. Even the estimable Ken Stott’s first entrance as Sir is less worryingly dishevelled than clumsily rumpled, suggesting that he has been battling not his own inner demons but a large Scotch too many.

Foley and his company – which also includes Harriet Thorpe as Sir’s common-law wife (which is why he never got the knighthood he covets) and Selina Cadell as the stage manager whose stoic loyalty is founded on decades of unrequited love – engage fully with Harwood’s increasingly minor-key musings on various forms of personal attachment and on art as both a fuel and a surrogate for life. However, they never quite cure us of the expectation – the desire, even – to write almost all of it off with another laugh.

Written for the Financial Times.