When you are greeted at the entrance of the Howard Theatre a vanguard of statuesque ushers kindly tell you to relax in the sepulchral clinician’s bar. After ten minutes spent spaciously detached from your fellow man in this white cavern you then move, at the advice of a chilling overhead tannoy, into the theatre. However much I might have suffered such early discomfort at how needlessly slick student theatre seemed to have become, I was comforted somewhat by the rambunctious comedy that ensued onstage.

As Alex Lass states in his director’s notes: it is something of a surprise  that Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years, in which a group of wintry graduates reconvene for a reunion at their Oxbridge alma mater, has never been performed in Cambridge before. The play’s mixture of madcap upper-class characters tirelessly minced through the well-worn machine of farce seems to fit well with Cambridge’s sometimes woolly brand of conservatism. And the script, though fatted with a number of knee-slapping jokes, could have seemed laboriously frothy if not for the assured series of performances which prevented it from forming into a tooth-sugaring strip of theatrical candy.

The raucous energy of Johan Munir’s Headingly (especially in the second half) was at points wonderfully excessive. Yet this was balanced out with a number of subtler motifs: a blend of obnoxious sniggers, surreal looks into the near horizon and several pathetic, wimpy physical quirks saved for the character’s bathetic fall. Similarly, Holly Olivia Braine’s well-timed shifts from collected ease to sickly angst proved another example of comic control. She injected to her role the kind of grace one would not expect to be present in such a foppish drama.

Behind these performances lay a phalanx of brightly vivified caricatures. Harry Carr as the snakish clergyman, proffering the odd camp witticism and bizarre sexual allusion, managed to successfully contort himself into a sly depiction of this velvet-clad weirdo. Craig Nunes committed to his potentially two-dimensional role as the bumbling nobody and, resultantly, produced a brilliantly volcanic clown. Finally, Theo Hughes-Morgan as the skulking, sulking Quine loomed over the proceedings with an oozing, sardonic set of deliveries.

The acting, for all its nuanced depictions, ultimately failed to stop this play from becoming anything more than a genteel romp. While a good friend of mine presently reminded me that the production had nothing more to offer than fun frippery it seems frustrating that any theatre team would start from such a premise. The Howard Theatre is well built to host sturdy comedies such as The Relapse. But its design can seem needlessly plush when putting on farce and, consequently, makes one wonder about the financial benefits of this clean yet genre-restricted little playhouse.