“GET me rewrite,” snap the super-cynical reporters into their phones in the glorious 1928 farce The Front Page. That’s what the National Theatre has done 32 years after first staging the play. The US playwright John Guare has conflated Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s comic valentine to their inky youth with His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks’s 1940 movie version, which turned the ace newshound Hildy Johnson into a woman (Rosalind Russell) and her editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) into her former husband who’s trying to stop her remarrying.

Jack O’Brien’s production acknowledges this blend of stage and screen with the action played out on Bob Crowley’s monochrome set of a Chicago courthouse’s press room as if it is being filmed on a movie soundstage. Thankfully the doors are robust enough for the cast to slam and rush through in the second half.

That’s when Hildy, torn between her insurance salesman fiancé and Walter, can’t resist the scoop that lands in her lap. With a fugitive cop killer hidden in a journalist’s roll-top desk, the mayor and his spineless sheriff hiding the man’s reprieve for their vote-grabbing ends, and the hack pack smelling a rat among the rats, the play bursts into farcical life.

While Hawks’s movie set up Hildy and Walter’s relationship, then cut to the courthouse capers, Guare weaves Hildy and Walter’s love-hate spats into the press room antics. It causes ebbs in the comic flow. But the rapid-fire wisecracks and the farce still prove irresistible and Alex Jennings’s Walter and Zoë Wanamaker’s Hildy make a crackerjack team.

Whether he’s bullying or remarking about a diabetic employee that “I oughta know better than to hire anyone with a disease”, Jennings never loses his debonair quality. Wanamaker is a wily dame who can slip unnoticed into a poker game as one of the boys or plant kisses on an interviewee to get her story. Guare sums up the pair by giving Walter the remark about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers:

“She gave him sex and he gave her class.”

By setting the action on the eve of war in 1939, Guare also wants to paint a bigger picture of soiled ethics, equating the reporters’ blinkered appetite for local sensation with America’s pre-war isolationism that sees Hitler’s Germany as more of a market than a menace. The actors appear before each half of the evening, having their make-up adjusted or muttering about using their best takes, presumably to echo the egotism of journalism.

These are unnecessary additions. The original play’s beady-eyed view of casual racism, political sleaze and journalistic ethics still says it all. But at least Guare pulls off some zingy jokes of his own, as well as having a priest (Sam Beazley, Methuselah in a dog collar), forever looking for Death Row, leading an hilarious shotgun wedding at the end.

In a supporting cast stuffed with character cameos, Margaret Tyzack almost steals the show as Hildy’s prospective mother-in-law, a battleaxe in furs with a hatred of female writers. But it’s Jennings and Wanamaker who really make the production fizz. Despite its lulls, there are enough big laughs to make this adaptation great fun. Hold the front page! His Girl Friday is a hit.

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