Complications pile up when a young woman, dressed in pyjamas, seeks refuge from her bullying stepfather at a country house in the middle of the night.
An extract from the review of the 2009 revival:

Travers's plot hinges on the slenderest of premises: the embarrassment caused to the newlywed Gerald Popkiss when he is forced to hide a fugitive, pyjama-clad female from the prying eyes of his sister-in-law and an overbearing housekeeper. Keeping the balls in the air is hard work, but Travers just about gets away with it for two reasons. He matches the hectic comic business with a dotty verbal inventiveness that leads otherwise sane people to utter lines like: "You ate wurts and Nutts split?" Far from creating a totally innocent world, Travers also launches a surprisingly vehement attack on petty-minded scandalmongers who see the worst, or possibly the wurts, in everything. But what really matters is how the piece is played.
To enter Travers's world is to go back in time to an era when sex was irredeemably naughty and blustering Germans and spluttering admirals were automatically funny. But it is worth making the effort, if only to understand the ultimate source of a play like Michael Frayn's Noises Off - and to relish, as here, farce acting at its dexterous best.









