I, Lear is essentially an 80-minute piss take of the acting profession. However, what the boys from the Black Sheep theatre company successfully provide is laughs by the bucket-load and a comforting reminder that contemporary comics don’t always let the wackiness outweigh the wit. Highlights include the most off-beat Dickensian abridgement you’ll likely ever see (creators of recent flop Dickens Unplugged could learn a thing or two), and a brilliantly terrible interpretation of Lear’s fool.

Director Cal McCrystal (who has worked with Cirque du Soleil, amongst others) helps ensure that I, Lear transcends the ’student revue’ tag by tightly choreographing the clowning, ensuring that every gurn is timed to perfection. I, Lear is so enormously likeable it even ended with an invitation to join ‘Chesty’ and ‘Huge’ over the road for a pint!

The duo play a pair of aging hams, Hugh Carpenter and Chester Blenheim, who cannot help but hark back to their halcyon days. Hugh is the more high-strung of the two while Chester is something of a cad. Together they lecture the audience on the tricks of treading the boards. Jones and Murtagh are accomplished stage clowns and the latter comes up trumps in a skit on Greek theatre, while Jones shines in his riff on Alan Bennett. Though their strongest moments are when they are performing separately, their absurd, final, car-crash renderings of Cats and King Lear bring the show to a close in a suitably hilarious fashion.

Proper laugh aloud moments, coupled with a warm love of the medium that it was mocking, a combination that proved rather endearing and infectious.

Andrew Jones as Professor Bumm and Ciaran Murtagh as Dr Willy Whee are a larger-than-life face-pulling duo with a splendid range of silly voices. The story machine, a ramshackle structure which growls and bleeps behind them, is defunct so they will have to make up their own stories - with audience help. It’s risky stuff for a pair of actors because they really do have to ad-lib most of the stories in response to audience participation.

All four pre-interval stories were entertaining, but one about an old lady with a teapot entertaining her friends at Christmas tea (I gave the word ‘teapot’ so I know it was no fix) was truly hilarious as Murtagh, sellotaped into a dress and wig by a manic Jones, made the tale more and more outrageous. Jones and Murtagh are very skilled at supporting and spinning off each other.

Jones and Murtagh have always been inventive with their delicious silliness over the years and this years offering is of no lesser quality, as the versatile comic actors showcase a whole gambit of their talents, all somehow held together by the directing talents of Cal McCrystal.