@ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 16 May 2015

The absurdities of the upper classes are visited on theatre audiences again. The master is the nice-but-dim chinless wonder Bertie Wooster who parries with his indefatigable valet Jeeves. Writer PG Wodehouse was a masterful social critic and wordsmith but this world of deferential butlers, dotty aunts and upper-class twits and the gentle ribbing they take may seem to some a little hollow in a modern-day Britain that is lorded over by an Old Etonian ruling class.

“I can’t do with any more education, I was full up years ago,” says buffoon Bertie who, with his nervous honking laugh, makes Boris Johnson look like a model of self-restraint. Wodehouse was enormously prolific – he wrote bestsellers, plays and music lyrics – and Jeeves and Wooster is his best-remembered invention and a hugely loved national treasure memorably resurrected in the 1990s by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie in a warmly received TV version. The familiarity factor certainly helps. Bertie (played with quivering zest by Robert Webb) has to retrieve a silver antique cow-creamer from a country house for his Aunt Agatha aided by Jeeves (Jason Thorpe) and Agatha’s butler Seppings (the riotously energetic Christopher Ryan who is best remembered for his role in TV’s The Young Ones). Bertie has to negotiate the situation without risking his bachelorhood, under threat from Totleigh Towers’ Madeline.

This is a three hander with a variety of roles played by Thorpe and Ryan. The conceit is that Jeeves and Wooster are putting on the play themselves to tell the story so there’s lots of quick changes of costume and scenery that is deliberately wobbly. If this slapstick, the Goonish names like Spivvy (or was it Stiffy?) Byng and Gussie Pinknottle and the very Englishness of it all are your cup of Darjeeling then you’re in for a treat. There are plenty of laughs along the way with jokes and pratfalls aplenty.

The adapters Robert and David Goodale capture the period daftness of Woodhouse who makes his aristos and forbearing servants charming and lovable in all their silliness. And director Sean Foley marshals his forces with aplomb. The play-within-a-play idea gives the whole enterprise a sense of real zip. Or as Bertie would say, it’s spiffing.