For a moment you’re filled with dread. A man in a striped vest, second cousin to the late Marcel Marceau, starts doing fey things with bits of bicycle, pretending a wheel is a hat or handlebars are antlers. It looks as if a comic, ie, painfully unfunny, mime show is in the offing. But the four Americans onstage – Joe Liss, Mark Nutter and John Rubano, who created the musical, and Dan Castellaneta, who plays the main role – turn out to be genially spoofing everything, including mime.

You may not have heard of Castellaneta, but if you’ve seen The Simpsons you’ve heard him, for he’s the voice of Homer, though he doesn’t have an oval yellow head or hands like washing-up gloves, but is pink, thin, pointy-nosed and scrubby-haired. He’s also very amusing as Steve, the American whose bike breaks down in a French village that must be twinned with the League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey or, more likely, a town where John Cleese is the mayor.

There’s much to remind you of Monty Python. The bicycle menders interrupt their argument about whether food can be bought at the local parfumerie to berate Steve. The local restaurateur officiously bullies him, then refuses him grub.

He’s forced to see mad puppet shows and boring old films, getting hungrier all the time. Only in the youth hostel can he find a bed, which he must share with a Dutch nerd called Rem van Opdorp, who sings himself to sleep with loud Japanese folk-songs. And Steve wins a talent show, beating a man whose forte is distinguishing a dog’s breed by eating its faeces, only to be arrested as he celebrates his triumph.

Skullduggery, as this company is aptly called, isn’t afraid of bad taste or political incorrectness. One number, a spoof minstrel song, is about the fun of being white, and another, a spoof Broadway song, about not being wholly gay. There’s also a lullaby, sung to a baby doll, about how love is lust, pets will eat you, and life is meaningless: “It’s better that you know”.

I’m ashamed to say I laughed often, feeling that these performers – Rubano and Liss so versatile that they change shape with each of a dozen roles – were worthy of their predecessors at their base camp, which is the Second City nightclub in Chicago. They’re gleefully perpetuating the satire boom launched there years ago by Mike Nichols and Elaine May. And they’re sometimes as funny.

Box office: 020-7226 1916

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