THIS is the play that goes wrong deliberately, and the more it does, the better it becomes, in a change from calamitous nights at the theatre your reviewer won’t revisit.

Comedy has passed this way previously in Michael Green’s Art Of Coarse Acting lampoonery and the glorious chaos of the amateur stage shenanigans in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, but that was written 32 years ago, so why shouldn’t a new troupe of bright young things mine the same comic coal face?

A new generation can enjoy physical farce and choreographed catastrophes that make up this show, just as a new stock of Cambridge Footlights or this year’s variation on The Young Ones will always come along. That said, any theatregoer, of any age, will enjoy the kamikaze comic chemistry of Mischief Theatre.

The company was founded in 2008 by London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts graduates, initially as an improvised comedy group, and that spirit is still alive in the scripted works of artistic director Henry Lewis, company director Jonathan Sayer and fellow writer Henry Shields. The trick, just as in Berwick Kaler’s “ad-libbed” pantomimes, is to make it appear off-the-cuff: a double bluff to go with the play within a play that is unfolding.

That play is The Murder At Haversham Manor (perfectly timed to follow up Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee at the Grand Opera House and Theatre Mill’s on-going courtroom drama, Christie’s Witness For The Prosecution, in the York Guildhall Council Chambers).

As introduced by “first-time director” Chris Bean (Shields), this massacre of a murder mystery is the latest show from the hapless Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, a hapless company so short of actors and finance that last year it staged Chekhov’s Two Sisters.

Shields’ Chris will re-emerge as Inspector Carter, whose moustache, demeanour and gait all recall John Cleese, and his Inspector Cleeseau is not alone in making you think of the frantic covering-up of Fawlty Towers. Everyone is playing someone playing someone, or they are by the end when sound engineer Trevor (Rob Falconer) and crew member Annie (Lotti Maddox) are pressed into emergency roles on stage.

Much of the comic joy lies in the ensemble interplay as somehow the show must go on, no matter how many mishaps befall actors and Nigel Hook’s set alike, but there are delightfully observed send-ups of actor types too.

Lewis roars around with the bluster of a Brian Blessed; Charlie Russell parodies a hammy actress with a massive ego and an inappropriate range of B-movie mannerisms; Jonathan Sayer’s butler sends up actors who mispronounce words almost beyond recognition; Dave Hearn’s Max recalls actors that play to the audience, not the script, forever stepping out of character.

Greg Tannahill’s Jonathan keeps turning up at the wrong moment, all part of the momentum of a Mischievous misadventure that has been stretched to two hours since the EdinburghFringe, to make going Wrong even more of a right laugh.

The Play That Goes Wrong, Mischief Theatre, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday, 7.30pm, plus 2pm today and 2.30pm, Saturday; also Leeds Grand Theatre, July 7 to 12. Box office: York, 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk; Leeds, 0844 848 2700.