Feydeau seems to have dropped off the map as far as our national companies are concerned. But Sam Walters is keeping the tradition of French farce alive at the Orange Tree. And even if this show, a co-production with the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, still needs fine-tuning, it has the right sense of escalating frenzy.
Why do we still find Feydeau so funny? I suspect because he appeals simultaneously to our appetite for order and our lust for mayhem. Here, for instance, the impeccably bourgeois Duchotel uses game-hunting as a camouflage for adultery; meanwhile, his best friend besieges Duchotel's wife, who will only yield when persuaded of her husband's hanky-panky. They all end up in adjacent rooms in a seedy Paris apartment block losing trousers, dignity and temper.
Feydeau seems strangely ancient and modern. Duchotel poking fun at a figure disguised in a bedsheet, unaware it is his own wife, is straight out of The School for Scandal. Yet when a landlady reminisces about her affair with a lion-tamer on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, we seem inside the lunatic world of Ionesco. Part of the skill of Richard Cottrell's translation is that it reminds us that Feydeau invokes comic tradition while anticipating theatre of the absurd.
Walters also shows how Feydeau can be done in the round: there's an almost oriental stylisation about characters visibly hiding in secret cabinets or about a busy stage manager reproducing the sound of banging doors. Only when an actor "dried" was the mood broken: in most plays it wouldn't matter but in Feydeau the whole construct is suddenly threatened. Although more work is needed, Philip York's Duchotel has a fine comic sang-froid - even when it's revealed that his bulging game basket is filled with tinned paté.
· Until May 24. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
