A riotous assembly has escaped the 2017 City of Culture, crossed the Humber Bridge and ended up on the stage of The Swan, where it’s delivering a hugely funny and raucous comedy.

I’ll get round to the two missing stars beside the title. But that assembly – the Hull Truck Company and the RSC who jointly premiered the show in Kingston-Upon-Hull, will be resting happy at the applause level, which was the most enthusiastic I’ve heard this season.

The title: The Hypocrite, suggested a new take on Moliere by Hull born writer Richard Bean – who came to the fame with Made in Dagenham and One Man, Two Guvnors. There are similarities, but this is bawdy, full-throttle farce with a leading character who delights in openly demonstrating the way he plays one side against the other.

Those sides in a story based upon history are the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, as in 1642 they jostle to control Hull and its large store of munitions. The fly in both their ointment was Sir John Hoffman who sealed the city for Cromwell, but who was executed when he had second thoughts.

In Bean’s version he’s on the side of his hard-up self, pocketing military money from both sides and trying to raise a dowry for his man-mad daughter. Mark Addy gives him a likeable, solid stature from which to make his humorous asides. As the play starts at the end, his first lines are delivered from his decapitated head – a nice Bean touch.

He’s probably well out of it. His wife played by a regrettably underemployed Caroline Quentin is having an affair with his cousin, leader of a ‘Christian’ cult devoted to sinning. His daughter played with endearing hysteria by Sarah Middleton is desired by two royal princes personed by Jordan Metcalfe and Rowan Polonski, who for some reason take to cross-dressing. And there’s an Inigo Jones love bed which, with half the cast hidden around it, becomes the disintegrating finale for the unmasking of a lustful Puritan as maliciously ground out by Neil D’Souza.

Much more too: Ben Goffe as a superbly pompous King Charles turning r’s into w’s, whilst imperially mounted upon a wheeled horse, Danielle Bird as an aged servant, the victim of every slapstick harm in the book, prostitutes, Levelers, jokes about Hull, plays upon Shakespeare characters, spirited scene-changing songs from Phill Ward, and half started never finished serious discussions upon sexuality, social justice and more.

What’s missing, what former stand-up comedian Bean or director Phillip Breen should have applied is strict editing. The plentiful jokes – frequently observations by Sir John Hotham, can be uproariously good, can be flat non-events. Likewise there’s an over-carry of comic business, sex act imitations aren’t funny by definition, and the longer the longer the long plot continues the more it unravels.

There’s a great comedy here struggling to get out: meanwhile the irreverence, energy and zest of this production still leaves you smiling.   ★★★☆☆      Derek Briggs      12^th April 2017