By Jeeves – review

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alan Ayckbourn are not used to flops, but their collaboration on this PG Wodehouse-inspired musical lasted only 38 performances in the West End in 1975. It was rewritten for the reopening of Scarborough's Stephen Joseph theatre in 1996, and it's this version which is revived at the Landor. A jolly jape it is too, provided you enjoy Wodehouse's very particular brand of silly-ass humour and don't mind an extremely convoluted book, plus songs that often owe a considerable debt to Noël Coward.

This production has a space to match the size of the show, a cast who rise way above the material, a terrific band and a director, Nick Bagnall, with a keen sense of fun, but who keeps a tight rein on the proceedings. Designer Morgan Large has transformed the Landor into a village hall, where Bertie Wooster stars in the local fundraiser. There are curling cucumber sandwiches, cherry bakewells and a nervous vicar, and when Bertie's banjo mysteriously disappears, the dependable Jeeves steps into the breach to narrate a colourful episode from the life of Bertie and his intellectually challenged friends. Kevin Trainor (clearly limbering up to play Mr Toad) is terrific, Paul M Meston's Jeeves is appropriately calming and deadpan, and in a wonderfully energetic, tap-dancing cast Charlotte Mills is outstanding as Honoria Glossop.

In less expert hands, the final nod to Lloyd Webber's upcoming Wizard of Oz could be toe-curling, but here it's rather fun – like the rest of the show. Before the interval I was finding the postmodern quips and relentless facetiousness slightly tiresome; by the end, I was beaming along with everyone else. It's preposterously good fun, and entirely forgettable in the nicest possible way.