The Play That Goes Wrong is the kind of theatrical fairy story that producers dream about. What started off as a modest fringe production in a pub has grown and grown and is now a bona fide West End hit in a proper theatre. This farcical tale of onstage calamity during a production of a provincial murder mystery transferred to the Duchess last autumn and is still booking well ahead so I thought I’d better play catch-up.

I’m glad I did. And I’m even more glad I saw it at the end of a particularly exacting week. I was not really in the mood to engage my brain and this was the perfect play for the occasion. As the frankly crappy Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society tackle the melodramatic Murder at Haversham Manor the only option is to sit back and laugh your socks off as the cock-ups pile up.

Props won’t stay in the right place, lines are shouted out of sequence. Over-acting, upstaging and mugging to the audience is rife. And this is just in the first couple of scenes. Every possible laugh is squeezed out, with some of the set-ups even happening at the box office before the curtain rises. Apparently a colleague was slipped a comic bribe during the interval and while I wasn’t – boo hiss – there was a woman behind me chortling so heartily I was convinced she was a plant put there to remind me how hilarious the show was. The programme, by the way, is an unusually funny read too. 

To reveal specific prat-falls would spoil some of the fun, but the second half of the production is particularly spectacular, with the elaborate set seeming to develop a mind of its own. The slapstick is expertly choreographed throughout – it takes hard work to fall over the way this lot fall over without breaking a few bones. I noticed Miranda Hart sitting down in front of me just after the interval. Maybe she was taking notes.

There are funnier knockabout plays. Spymonkey have used this so-bad-it’s-brilliant format before to great effect. Sketch group The Trap used to do this sort of thing regularly. Some of the physical comedy scenes in James Corden’s One Man, Two Guvnors were positively uproarious. And Noises Off, by Michael Frayn, sets up a more cohesive back story. One doesn’t really have much emotional investment in the cast of TPTGW – the actors are relative unknowns and by cutting straight to the chase we don’t really get any insight into their characters. But on the other hand TPTGW is eye-wateringly funny from soup to nuts. If you like comedy and you like theatre and you don’t feel like thinking this is the perfect night out.

Currently booking until September 5. Tickets here.