We take our seats to a cacophony of noise and fluster. The school governors will be with us shortly, they say – but they want us to know right now that they’re sorry. Though not, of course, to blame! John Donnelly’s masterful 2020 script is a hilarious satire of the modern culture of censure, and the Morton Players, a large cast of sixth-formers from Guildford High School, have a lot of fun with this rollicking telling of it.

The Unfortunate Incident after which the play is named is actually rather banal; the kind of thing that, back in my schooldays, would have led to an angry talk at assembly and a week of gossipy speculation over who might be to blame. But this is the online age, so a photo has gone viral and the governors unwisely feel the need to respond. What follows is a ludicrous escalation – a beautiful parody of virtue-signalling scandal – as apologies for deficiencies in previous apologies pile up, and the Downing Street lectern ultimately becomes involved.

The opening comes as a breathless tsunami of scenes and words, as the hapless governors watch the firestorm develop and dig themselves ever deeper into the hole. The ensemble take this on with energy and precision; the storytelling is clear, the flow and choreography nothing less than superb. The cast build their characters deftly, with merest glances often laden with meaning. I particularly admired Karma Meyer’s leather-jacketed rebel, who’s really rather enjoying it all.

The slower-paced middle section may suffer a little in comparison, but it’s here that Donnelly’s more serious messages begin to come through. A magnificent rant from Emily Sturrock reflects our own frustration at the shallowness of the apologies, and the way that public figures simply say what they think we want to hear. It’s all wrapped up, many twists and turns later, by a powerful monologue from Alice Cox – which in lesser hands could seem insultingly didactic, but here is the perfect challenge to a world where nobody listens, nobody thinks, and nothing ever changes.

There’s technical ambition too, with live projections capturing the media craze, but most of all there’s clever absurdity to the concept and the words. Donnelly’s script packs in all the familiar clichés – “lived experience”, “period of reflection”, and all the rest – while the supremely talented cast find the humour and the bite in each and every one. “And that’s why” I heartily recommend this spirited and meaningful show, which leaves the Morton Players with absolutely nothing to apologise for at all.