There's something rather defensive about the programme note, which declares 'My purpose is to please, to entertain, to get people laughing'. Not the motto of Tom Stoppard but of Johann Nestroy who provided the basis for Stoppard's latest comic exercise with his mid-19th Century comedy Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen  (also the basis of The Matchmaker / Hello Dolly apparently).

On The Razzle is a mixture of farce and comedy with some pleasing sets by Carl Toms (heralded by back-projected sheet music at every turn) and some splendid  comic performances (Michael Kitchen's loquacious servant, Felicity Kendal in apprentice drag and Dinsdale Landen as a malapropistic pomposity of a master grocer). The decisive Stoppardian touches are also present.

What keeps the show afloat, despite a comic voyage which takes us froma small-town grocer's shop to the dizzy heights of Imperial Bourgeois Vienna are Stoppard's dazzling string of verbal jests, misunderstandings, puns and allusions strung together from the beginning of the proceedings: 'I love your niece'...'My knees,sir?  Oh my niece. Well my niece and I are not  to be prised apart so easily, and nor are hers...'.  It might be small beer from the author of Travesties, but that would be to miss the point of the production.