One Man, Two Guvnors is a show with no dead weight. Everything is on a knife’s edge; this is a script that requires expert timing to keep it buoyant, to ensure that we do not lose our bearings amid a plot that moves fast. It is a script that shifts at an instant and does not allow us to find our feet. The strength of this play rests in its casting. These are performers self-conscious of their characters’ archetypes, but they have the theatrical guts to uphold and control them, not be steamrolled beneath them. Required to act, sing, and dance, pick up and lose accents and identities between conversations, no word is wasted, no lines left unexploited.

“The cast of One Man, Two Guvnors is operating at full wattage”

In a play that must be funny, each actor is only as good as the energy their co-stars emit, and the cast of One Man, Two Guvnors is operating at full wattage. Farce needs commitment, needs fearlessness. It is a tightrope between hilarity and humorlessness, and no-one here loses their footing because no-one gives less than a hundred percent. Joe Morgan plays the lead Francis Henshall, who finds himself juggling two guvnors at once amid the explosive chaos of mistaken identities, death-threats, and a would-be tragic lover who, as it turns out, is really just “a bit of a twat.” This is an actor who takes up space, over exaggerates, but it works. His off-the-cuff improv, well-rehearsed physicality (I’d never thought I’d see someone eating paper in the ADC), and razor-sharp asides are amplified by his fellow performers, even the participating audience members, who imbibe his energy the moment they set foot on the stage.

My full attention was almost entirely held by the play, save for the occasional musical interlude that lasted a little too long as the set could be heard changing in the background. Yet there was little repetition, little that I could predict. Working with a phenomenal script, one-liners came quick paced and punchy and meta-theatrical flashes were detonated with expert control. The flesh of farce is made up of stock characters. Although it may be easy to be consumed by this farce, the cast wore their archetypes comfortably, pointing them out and teasing us with the artifice of their construction. Stanley’s (Jay Palombella) upper-class drawl, punctuated by expertly grating “buggerellos,” was exactly overdone. Rachel’s (Rosie Parrish) macho alter-ego was everything we could hope for in a 60s gangster, embodying the stereotype without being restrained by it, poking fun at our expectations from the inside.

“No-one gives less than a hundred percent”

The energy did not fail between the opening scene, a well-oiled orchestration of character introduction, and the curtain falling to a group musical number complete with jazz hands and high kicks. In the time between we’d seen attempted murder, xylophone playing, gender-swapping, and an unexpected volume of meatballs. Secondary characters filled out the comedic backdrop, staging a series of slapstick injuries and pantomime-esque routines that nearly always landed, the timing sharp enough to forget there was intentional timing at all. I had not laughed in the ADC before. This was a new, slightly disconcerting experience. One Man, Two Guvnors is paced down to the second, and it’s the rapidity of the scene changes, mood-changes, quick-fire duologues, and dizzying comedic bits that makes room for the sheer quantity of action that sizzles before our eyes.

What successful farce also needs is a willing audience; it survives upon it — the only way to re-order the threads that have been unravelled in such frenzy is to descend entirely into self-conscious bathos. “Wait”, Pauline (Harriet Haylock) complains moments before the close, “we’re missing a happy ending.” When the universe places this happy ending in their lap, we do not complain at coincidence. We do not notice its falsity. This is a show where audience, like cast, must entirely commit. Join in the madness, it tempts us. You might end up crouched under a table pulling apart prop-fish under the stage lights. It has, as the closing song attests, been “a day of manic catastrophes.” But if the price of watching is the risk of being sprayed with a fire extinguisher, it’s worth it.

One Man, Two Guvnors is playing at the ADC Theatre from Tuesday 23rd to Saturday 27th May, 7:45pm, with a 2:30pm matinee on Saturday