The test of a good farce is brutally simple. Never mind its author’s pretensions, which may stretch beyond whizzing through doors and hiding in cupboards. If the thing makes you laugh, it’s good. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. So Michael Frayn’s thespian farce Noises Off is good, very good. For me, sitting po-faced in row G, Richard Bean’s In the Club wasn’t.

Yet the situation is more topical than Frayn or Feydeau. Philip Wardrobe, a Labour MEP, has a chance of becoming President of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where the piece is set. Even though the opposition is apparently badly split, this is hard to credit, for James Fleet’s Wardrobe is a sex-obsessed ninny proud of receiving million-euro bribes from the Turks, who hope he’ll help them to EU membership.

Bean clearly thinks the EU an abysmally corrupt institution, which is fine. The trouble is that the logic that farce needs often seems missing. An EU fraud sleuth hides with his listening device in the cupboard but seems fazed, not by sinister Turks and their bulging suitcases, but by the possibility that one of Wardrobe’s lovers may be making false claims on her farm. Anyway, this investigator stays in situ while a caricature German whip offers the MEP high office, his partner arrives from England begging him to make her pregnant, and he has unwitting sex with an ardent French colleague.

Unwitting because the letter-bomb Wardrobe has whimsically sent himself has spluttered off, doing him no apparent damage but, again illogically, getting a doctor to blindfold him. As the strenuous antics escalated, I found myself believing less and less and so laughing less and less. Also, there’s a coarseness here that David Grindley’s production can’t conceal. Never mind the easy gibes: “I’m a Belgian”; “Bad luck”. But you don’t have to admire Peter Mandelson to wince when Wardrobe’s boorish UKIP chum compares him with a celebrated dictator: “Stalin was a fascist and mass murderer but at least he weren’t a poof.” Yuk.

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