Never has bleakness been so much fun. After last week’s excursions into this kind of theatre offered up dancing love hearts and people gazing sullenly from bins I was wary of another one. I need not have worried. Milan Kundera is more whimsical than many of his compatriots in the realm of the absurd, and only sometimes less serious : this production is faithful to his spirit of mischief, conceived and performed with grace, wit and enrapturing vivacity.

The partnership between rogueish servant and his musingly stupid master is central, and here it flourishes. Harry Carr cannot be said to steal the show, for as Jacques it is rightfully his, but his acting as well as his casting makes him the dominant figure. In a play where the characters do almost as much watching and listening as the audience, to reminiscent monologues and the re-enactment of them, his expressively mobile face and staring, almost protuberant eyes are a rich and responsive source of comedy. When he does speak his boyish scampiness is very plausible, at once knowing and more subtly naïve, though the one-liners are fired off smoothly and with sardonic affection. Best of all he achieves something rare and usually problematic – a sense of progression. There is by the end a wisdom and generosity which was earlier implicit but as yet unrealised.

Patrick Garety, almost as good, combines an employer’s noblesse (not unaided by the gulf in height) with a indulgent respect for his servant’s resourcefulness. His lubriciousness has a paradoxical innocence, and yet stays – indeed, becomes – amusedly aware of itself. Once again, character is not allowed to remain static : the gullible, almost insipid figure of the retrospective scenes (‘flashback’ misses their mellowness) becomes more plushly contemplative.

Those passages in which Carr and Garety recount their earlier adventures introduce a splendid supporting cast. Remembered figures flit on to the blue-lit back half of the stage as the dialogue continues up front, simulating just the fusion of past and present the play so insists upon. The spectacle of the two ‘pious’ women kneeling at Vespers in what was the hayloft, beneath a kitsch but simple cross, well captures the deft and striking set work.

Garety’s friend and betrayer is gloriously conniving with a debonair strut and a larynx that seems custom-made to sneer. The inevitable Kunderan marquise, who doubles as bawling barmaid, delights and when appropriate disturbs with her glamour and energy. Her lover, though excellent, is upstaged by his own velvet jacket, the jewel of an elegant production wardrobe.

The play’s amused awareness of itself, though it never grates, demands almost parodic over-acting, a demand the whole cast meets well and of which Carr’s performance is the best example. It’s cruel to wonder if they’d be as good playing it straight, when everything is so apt and exuberant. Surrounded by chaos and coincidence their characters face a fate worse than fate, but do so with an élan that confounds its grimness.