Don’t Dress for Dinner is an unashamed farce. Following a couple in their house in the French countryside, both husband and wife are trying to smuggle their respective lovers into the house without arousing suspicion. Within an elaborate web of improbably bluffs, mistaken identities and gross misunderstandings, chaos naturally ensues.

To give you the level of it, we’re talking somewhere between Men Behaving Badly and a Carry On film. The play has no pretension to high art or deeper meaning. It’s silly, a bit smutty, and rife with slapstick. I will say that I find the quipping and ridiculous plotting the stronger suite of the play. The loud, shouty and anarchic slapstick, like so many farces, lacks the discipline of a delicately contrived one-liner.

There is a slight whiff of a chip-on-the-shoulder in the programme where it bemoans that the original French dramatist Marc Camoletti is not given much attention by academics or intellectuals despite the success of his plays. Dare I say, the obvious reason is because this is a solid and conventional farce but there is little to be gained by plumbing its depths. Like a particularly bawdy episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys (with corpsing and all), there’s no attempt to address anything beyond the audience’s sense of humour.

This may reflect my cynicism but the predilection for corpsing, fluffing the odd line, and winking at the audience is probably a lot more rehearsed than it appears – which is fine. If there’s any sort of production to which this is appropriate (other than a pantomime), it is this one. Certainly the actors know how to play the audience and make a good show of it whether or not their breaking of the illusion is rehearsed or not. Damian Williams in particular secures a lot of belly laughs this way.

Certainly there’s no appeal to anyone seeking serious or deep theatre, but if you want a good laugh in a so far dreary June, Don’t Dress for Dinner fits the bill.   ★★★☆☆   Fenton Coulthurst   6^th June 2017