Terry Johnson's latest play is not so much dead funny as dead hilarious, a shrewd commercial package of considerable wit and originality. Having established a flair for Freudian farce with Hysteria, he again reinvents the trouser-dropping tradition for his own cunning purposes in the best Ortonesqe / Stoppardian tradition of dramatic irony. This is the story of nerdish members of the Dead Comics Society whose own farcical sexual circumstances increasingly resemble The Benny Hill Show or What The Butler Saw in a classic example of life imitating art.

Johnson strains our credulity by making a consultant obstetrician the chairman of the fan-club, yet David Haig's pompous Richard is precisely the kind of inverted snob who prides himself on his encyclopaedic knowledge of popular culture. In fact his identification with the skirt-chasing Benny is shown as a sign of emotional immaturity: he no longer desires his clever wife Eleanor because he’s having a secret legover situation with a dim but pneumatic former Hill's Angel called Lisa. When Benny’s death is announced, members dress up as Fred Scuttle and Mr Chow Mein for an extraordinary general meeting that becomes the catalyst for chaos. Meanwhile a sex therapist has advised Eleanor, the sex-starved spectre at the Benny Hill feast, to don her own fancy-dress of black basque, stockings and suspenders in order to woo back her husband. Johnson, who also directs, allows real human pain to make its presence felt amid the sex-shocks and custard-pies of the second act when Zoe Wanamaker as acerbic Eleanor, and Danny Webb as cynical Nick, discover their partners are having an affair with each other. Niall Buggy's fey closet queen Brian and Beatie Edney’s vapid Lisa complete a superb cast for a vintage evening.