Two scruffy vaudevillians in shabby suits and battered bowlers are waiting for God. This is not Beckett, but a 1976 drama by the late Tom McGrath about the acclaimed comedy duo. And the play’s self-conscious absurdist references are its most interesting aspect.

Stan and Ollie, both deceased, are trapped in a purgatorial anteroom. Before they can pass into the next world they must re-enact their earthly lives — a task they duly perform in a blend of biography and skit that reveals disappointingly little about the men behind the onscreen personae, despite decent impersonations by Neil Bromley as Laurel and Simon Lloyd as Hardy.

We hear of their respective origins — Laurel’s in Britain, Hardy’s in the American South — and of their music-hall beginnings, and we get a quick rundown of their movies, including brief glimpses of the behind-the-scene wranglings between Stan, the creative brains of the double-act, and their long-time producer Hal Roach. They rarely shuck the mugging and mannerisms of their familiar schtick; when they do, the tone veers dangerously close to tears-of-a-clown cliché, with accounts of careers and health in decline. More intriguing details are scarce; the much-married Laurel’s eventful romantic life is only tantalisingly dangled.

Nor does the outside world intrude much in McGrath’s loving but limited diptych: the Great Depression and Second World War are barely mentioned.

Philip Dart’s production lacks zing and is clumsily punctuated by black-outs. So it’s left to Bromley and Lloyd to entertain with their rendition of the tics, double-takes and choreographed pratfalls that made the pair comedy icons. Happily, they pull this off with some aplomb; there’s a slick tit-for-tat sequence in which each divests the other of his clothes until they both stand forlorn in grubby long-johns, and a bravura rendition of the musical number Trail of the Lonesome Pine. But even these serve only to prompt the thought that you might just as well be watching the genuine articles on DVD.

Box office: 020-7287 2875, to July 18

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