This year’s Corpus Freshers’ Show is a somewhat disorderly – though not entirely charmless – romp through the life and times of Christopher Marlowe.

The play documents the great writer’s heady days as a Cambridge undergraduate and novice spy, with Bret Cameron taking on the role of Marlowe. Cameron makes a decent straight man to the more caricatured characters that surround him throughout, and shines in a few scenes thanks to his very good comic timing.

The humour often relies heavily on the audience’s knowledge of Cambridge life. In a fairly successful parody of freshers’ fair, a bewildered Marlowe hastily signs up to the witch-hunting society, the ruff appreciation society, the assassins’ guild, and many others too numerous and marginal to recall. A few minutes later, Marlowe is seen in ‘Cindye’s’, ordering two tankards of the finest mead.

Jokes like these are a little easy, though they did not go astray amidst an audience dominated by Cambridge students, many of who roared with laughter throughout the play.

Other jests were slightly more regrettable: the ruff appreciation society stall was manned by an exaggeratedly camp character, who mocked Marlowe at length for his lack of fashion sense and exclaimed: “I’ve seen black death victims that model better than you!” Somehow the jokes fell a little flat, perhaps because they were less tailored to the audience than the more Cambridge-specific humour, or simply because they relied on overused stereotypes.

The same could be said of some of the witticisms that arise as Marlowe crosses the channel to foil a dastardly French plot, based, somewhat inexplicably, in a convent. Cameron saves a quip about the permanently disdainful countenances of the French with some rather amusing facial contortions, but unrealistic stereotypes of our Gallic friends and slightly dodgy accents can only be expected to elicit a certain amount of laughter.

Connie Krarup’s performance as Francis Walsingham was remarkable for its charisma and consistency. In her hands Elizabeth I’s spymaster is transformed into a bumbling old man that might not impress a historian, but nonetheless makes for a fairly successful comic performance.

All in all, On Her Majesty’s Business is not exactly a work of comic genius, and many of the group scenes risked falling into shambles in a way that was more reminiscent of a school play than one could have wished. However, there is no denying that both cast and audience seemed to enjoy themselves, and, as a way to while away three-quarters of an hour, it was far from unpleasant.