Richmond has celebrated a brand new play by replacing the old russet programme with a new double-spread period photograph of Richmond Green, tastefully tinted in autumnal colours. Overheard, like the programme, strikes one with pleasure as a rediscovery of felicities, long appreciated but latterly either taken of granted or allowed to languish unseen. It is some years since new writing by Peter Ustinov has been seen on stage in this country, and the same goes for his lead players, although Deborah Kerr most recently coaxed new life into Candida and Ian Carmichael enlivened the musical I do, I do.

The author sets his scene in the winter garden of a British Embassy in a typical Ustovian never-neverland. Christopher Caulker (Carmichael) presides over an apparently staid breakfast party which, like himself, is madder than it looks, while his wife Iris, auburn hair tumbling carelessly over her shoulders, soon reveals herself more than ready to stumble out of her carefully cultured sang froid into a pleasurably sensual pool of tears. The White Rabbit she follows with somewhat unseemly haste into his, or rather her husband’s lair in his absence, is a self-opinionated but physically magnificent specimen of Russian poethood, who smashes through the window seeking asylum in the Embassy -  a performance of charm and good humour by Aharon Ipale.

The scene is set for a quadrille in which the partners are not changed so much as incentives; an eventuality for which we have been prepared in the first scene when Iris and Christopher do just that to relieve the tedium of their marriage. Positions are reversed and she discovers in her seemingly stolid partner a man who loves her deeply enough to accept the reawakening of her sexual passions by the poet as a stage in the development of their relationship as husband and wife. This is played out delightfully by Deborah Kerr and Ian Carmichael; she has never looked more beautiful or played comedy with more delicacy, while she suggests underlying affection with the utmost subtlety.

Some pruning is needed but Overheard is fun on several levels, and Ustinov’s dissection of political and national foibles are expertly directed by Clifford Williams in a stunning conservatory set by Alan Tagg, with an engagingly over-the-top performance by Paul Hardwicke as a drunken Kremlin official.