Matchbox Theatre (Hampstead Theatre)

Michael Frayn‘s Matchbox Theatre, twenty-odd sketches and playlets culled from last year’s beautifully produced print collection of linguistic and philosophical jeux d’esprit, is a throwback to the lost, dead days of revue before Beyond the Fringe; with added jokes about mobile phones, theatre-in-the-round, domestic squabbles and kitchen hardware.

Hamish McColl‘s production is like Alan Ayckbourn for eggheads, but there’s an uncertain alliance of tone between material and performance, a lack of line and definition in delivery and hairstyles, muddied audibility because of the reconfigured Chariots of Fire in-the-round theatre (no joke), and a progressive dwindling on the laugh-o-meter.

A short evening becomes a rather long one, not least in an on-the-page amusing "blackout number" for stage-managers with a David Attenborough-style voice-over commenting on "the nightly miracle of the scene change" and a curiously ungenerous attack on all the sponsors who keep Hampstead going in a cod Shakespearean finale.

For someone who wrote the funniest farce about theatre – Noises Off – the aim here is weirdly skew-whiff. Frayn started in Cambridge Footlights and caught the end of the 1950s West End vogue for revue in shows like Share My Lettuce (Bamber Gascoigne) and Pieces of Eight (Peter Cook). Even Harold Pinter was involved, a connection marked in a grim interrogation scene in which the playwright (a bespectacled, bullying Pinter type) taunts his prisoner with the chilling remark that if he requires artistic advice he will extract it by torture.

And torture we get, alas, in another deeply unfunny theatrical spoof of an awards ceremony, a woman running round the stage with a long telephone flex in an incomprehensible monologue, a heavy-handed attack on sloganeering in a café/menu situation and a lovers’ parting in an airport lounge where the flight announcer obliterates the ground-level drama with his own obsession to be heard.

Much of the best stuff comes early on, with two medieval stone effigies reliving their tomb-with-a-view differences above a disco night evensong practice in the crypt below, and two couples confusing affections and place names as they circle each other with holiday chit-chat.

Best of all, though hampered by an in-the-round messiness at point of delivery, is the sad condition of an E-flat contraphonium player at the back of an orchestra pit, seething with resentments and counting out the bars while waiting for his one moment of flatulent exposure.

That sketch is played well enough by Chris Larner, and the other five actors – Esther Coles, Tim Downie, Felicity Montagu, Nina Wadia and Mark Hadfield, with Hadfield, always brilliant, the pick – have their moments without ever nailing a conspiracy of confidential respect with the audience.

Something like a politician’s self-defeating, opaque riff on "let me be absolutely clear," or a brilliant re-write of "Tea for Two," should be far funnier than they actually are; instead, we sense yawning over-familiarity with the absurd political sincerity pose, and yawning unfamiliarity with, or interest in, No, No Nanette. Word by word, speech by speech, Frayn remains an exquisite master. But he is not seen to his best theatrical advantage in this stale pot-pourri.

Matchbox Theatre runs at the Hampstead Theatre until 6 June.