This lame-brained comedy by the Australian playwright Melanie Tait was first seen at the tiny Barons Court Theatre in 2001 and has been hanging around the London fringe on and off ever since. Watching it now, in its latest, updated incarnation directed by Bill Buckhurst, you can only marvel at its longevity.

Witless, pointless and stereotypical, it’s a stream of clichés and stale observations about life in the British capital. Monologues are awkwardly shoehorned into action that makes Home and Away look like Chekhov as we meet our friendly gang of Antipodeans abroad. In their squalid shared house, laddish Dan (the former Neighbours star Blair McDonough) and loser Eddie crack open tinnies with a lusty cry of “Up your bum!”, while sensible Sam contemplates going home to Sydney. Their bisexual Italian flatmate, Gio, minces in and out dispensing carnal wisdom and swearing extravagantly.

Meanwhile, the girls tussle with emotional problems — one is facing an abortion, another is infatuated with the womanising Dan, and a third is struggling to forge a career as an actress. They also spend a great deal of their time complaining about every aspect of their adopted home, from their dislikable work colleagues to the inefficiency of the NHS to the unsmiling faces on the Tube (what was that about whingeing Poms?). There’s little suggestion of what drew these young people across the globe to London — they socialise in an Aussie theme pub, and the single British character represented is a chinless, bigoted upper-class blonde who morphs for no good reason into a parody of Margaret Thatcher.

The jokes are ancient and lavatorial, and the tone swings between the ineptly sit-comedic and the soapily mawkish. The odd attempt at a surreal coup de théâtre — at one point, a backpacking guardian angel appears, with wings and white underwear — simply looks silly. A musical sequence in which Gio serenades Dan with a toilet-brush microphone is astoundingly awful.

Maybe there are enough homesick Australians in London happy to pay to see this shallow reflection of themselves — though frankly its depiction of them is doing them all a huge disservice. Anyone else in search of some inspired comedy from Down Under would be better advised to stick with Kath and Kim.

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