I confidently sit down to interview Charlie Parham, director of this week’s ADC mainshow The Priory, taking out my plucky little Android phone to record our conversation. It tells me bluntly that it “can’t start recording”, without deigning to say why. I am forced to record the interview on my interviewee’s flashy, smugly efficient Macbook instead. “What a farce!” we both chuckle. But our expressions quickly turn serious. For it is farce we are here to discuss.

The Priory, by Michael Wynne, is the latest in the line of recent Royal Court Theatre premieres to be revived in Cambridge, following last year’s Posh and The Acid Test. It has all the trappings of a traditional English farce: a bunch of middle class characters at a New Year’s Eve party in a possibly haunted house, with inter-personal histories, bags of self-pity and no doubt a good line in banter. But Parham insists this play is much deeper than an average farce. “I loved the production of Noises Off at the Old Vic at Christmas” he says. “But really, it is a bit pointless, isn’t it?” Instead, his new play has many elements of farce, but Wynne keeps the setting and the characters as real as possible, so that you might actually believe the events could take place. “The audience should feel they’re in the  country house with the characters”.

Parham claims that everyone involved is playing a 3D character, not some absurd stereotype. In fact one of his challenges as a director has been to keep the cast from devolving into the broader, more obviously comic figures the roles could so easily become. Mary Galloway’s Rebecca can never be allowed to just become “the media bitch”, for example. Rozzi Nicholson-Lailey’ Kate must be a protagonist we care about as well being a bit of an awful person. Characters and actors who might otherwise be indulged with physical comedy routines here have be fairly low-key, while maintaining something consistently amusing about them. It’s the balance, says Parham, between keeping the laughs coming and never letting the slipping-on-bananas, machinegun gags side of things intrude.

“Watching a farce can be like watching a train full of people having enourmous amounts of fun go past while the audience are all on the platform, cut off”. The actors need to repeat whatever the director found funny in the first place until the timing is so perfect and precise they no longer need think about it. For Parham, who has directed plenty of shows before this one, this is the biggest challenge of this particular show – to make everything run like clockwork every night, and for the performers to all have such a “clock” inside their head keeping them on track throughout – a challenge, he admits, that is bigger than he had thought.

Why this play then? The Royal Court, he says, does new plays that are very accessible to student actors. He didn’t see the original run, but found it in the Royal Court bookshop, and liked the fact it was neither clearly comedy or straight drama. The choice of a new play is a risky one for a mainshow, but he insists it’s important to keep Cambridge theatre freshened with new material from the London scene. But is the subject of wealthy people with “problems” not a little overdone? Not in this way, replies Parham. It is precisely because they are made to look so ridiculous in their plight that the play works. He also implies there is a twist which I as a mere interviewer should not be party to. My interest piqued, our conversation comes to a close, as does his Macbook. I leave, watching out for banana skins as I go.