The Ladykillers (Watermill Theatre, Newbury)

Graham Linehan (Father Ted) and Ealing Comedy scriptwriter William Rose prove a dream team in Linehan’s delicious stage adaptation of Rose’s classic film comedy, which gets a pitch-perfect revival in Lee Lyford's wonderfully inventive production.

Simon Kenny's equally inventive set takes you straight back to post-war London. He brilliantly exploits the Watermill's tiny stage to create the genteel shabbiness of respectable widow Mrs Wilberforce's cramped little home and the railway line it overlooks. The all-important upstairs room to let is on a vertiginous rake. So the gang members convening there, masquerading as a string quintet, must balance at eccentric cartoonish angles to plan their audacious robbery under cover of the classical music gramophone record they pretend they’re playing live,

The actors playing the gang members are perfectly cast, a shoe-in for the film’s Ealing comedy types and creating them afresh, probably because each relishes the physicality of his character. Paul Mundell's Professor Marcus, almost impossibly sinuous in both mind and body, recalls the artfully gangling limbs of Alec Guinness, yet makes the devious, quick-witted mastermind entirely his own in a riveting performance.

Harry Katsari is the archetypal young spiv, all slicked-back hair, swivelling eyes and nervous ticks. Dermot Cavanagh’s Major again looks just right and achieves the body language of the soldier demobbed post-war – his penchant for ladies' frocks making him rather loveable. John Biddle is convincingly menacing as another archetype, the sinister ‘foreigner’ and Alan Stocks is terrific as almost nice but definitely dim ex-boxer One-Round. The point is that they’re amoral villains, prepared to use violence, yet somehow still loveable rogues, unwilling to harm little old ladies – the male equivalents of the tart with the heart perhaps.

And of course the action revolves around Mrs Wilberforce herself, that valiant little old lady whose room to let fails to keep these wolves from her door, played with touching panache by Marlene Sidaway. She gets splendid comic support from local community actors as the clique of refined ladies she invites to a teatime concert. And a clever plot twist tops and tails the action with her confiding in local bobby Constable Macdonald (cuddly Matthew Alexander), too tactful to accuse her of wasting police time in an age when they could apparently afford to waste it.

The production gloriously celebrates and subverts the filmic possibilities, realising the robbery and subsequent police chase with a miniature (literally) coup-de-theatre. Do the thieves get away with it or get their come uppance? And does General Gordon, Mrs W’s beloved parrot, get his costly cure? Go find out and laugh till you cry.

The Ladykillers continues at the Watermill to 31 October