When it comes to farce, there is a fine line between hilarity and utter absurdity. Johnny Falconer, the director of What the Butler Saw at Corpus Playroom, dealt with this problem in a novel way, going so far past the line that it became a speck on the horizon. And – weirdly – it worked.

From the word go, What the Butler Saw is a fast-paced, phantasmagorical, improbable, impossible pandemonium of preposterousness, set, fittingly, in the psychiatrist’s office of a mental asylum – a psychiatrist whose attempt to sexually assault a would-be employee sets off a chain reaction of lies, manipulation, cross-dressing, death threats and, basically, utter madness. Raph Wakefield as Doctor Prentice acts as the glue holding the piece together, performing flawlessly as his character becomes increasingly entangled in his web of lies in an attempt to prevent his lecherous wife from finding out about the incident. His wife is herself an adulteress seeking to persuade her husband to employ a young rapist who assaulted and blackmailed her the previous day.

This ludicrous chain of implausible events dictated by the script could have made this show a disaster, but the dazzling performances of the cast – with their quick, well-delivered one-liners, fast thinking even when doors failed to open, props broke, and tongues twisted – saved it wholly from the risk of failure. Pete Skidmore in particular is wonderful as an eccentric visiting psychiatrist, whilst Chloe France dazzles as a smouldering, Jennifer-Lawrence-in-American-Hustle-esque alcoholic temptress.

As the plot gathers pace, following it becomes increasingly more difficult not least because the majority of the cast spend much of the time running around in various states of undress, and at times the humour does become extremely coarse, making this a performance not for the faint-hearted or easily offended. It works in the same way as Game of Thrones: it’s misogynistic, politically incorrect, vulgar and over-sexualised, but also – if you're willing to take it with a pinch of salt as a “sign of the times” – utterly enthralling.

As social commentary it is, perhaps, a little too ludicrous to act as a serious reflection upon our ideologically-constructed categorisations of people as “mad” or “sane”, “straight” or “gay”. But the liveliness and earnest captivity of the audience was evidence enough of the quality of the spectacle. Hats off to Johnny Falconer for managing to pull off a production which crashed and burnt amidst scathing reviews at the Vaudeville in London – an achievement of no small merit.

What the Butler Saw runs until Saturday 1 February at the Corpus Playroom.