USUALLY plays that go wrong never recover. Not so with Mischief Theatre's West End, touring, Broadway and international hit The Play That Goes Wrong, the one that goes wrong deliberately, and the more it does so, the better it becomes amid the calamitous clatter.

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 more than three decades ago, but given our love of farce, it was high time a new troupe of bright young things should mine the same comic coal face.

Step forward Mischief Theatre, founded in 2008 by London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts graduates, initially as an improvised comedy group, and that reckless spirit of adventure/misadventure is alive and kicking in TPTGW, a scripted piece by artistic director Henry Lewis, company director Jonathan Sayer and fellow writer Henry Shields.

The trick, just as in Berwick Kaler’s “ad-libbed” York Theatre Royal pantomimes, is to make it appear off-the-cuff: a double bluff to go with the play within a play that is unfolding.

Since the turn of the year a new cast is in place to negotiate the obstacle course of physical farce and choreographed catastrophes, so assuredly revelling in the kamikaze comic chemistry of Mischief Theatre's tumbling, crumbling template.

As introduced by “first-time director” Chris Bean (Jake Curran), they are determinedly striving to perform The Murder At Haversham Manor, the latest show from the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, a hapless company so short of actors and finance that last year it staged Chekhov’s Two Sisters, in the wake of the earlier The Lion...And The Wardrobe.

What ensues is a gravely serious but hugely comic massacre of a murder mystery, wherein Curran's Chris will re-emerge as Inspector Carter, the John Cleese of a piece that recalls the frantic covering-up of Fawlty Towers, the physical dexterity of Buster Keaton and the whodunnit murk of Cluedo.

Everyone is playing someone playing someone, or they are by the end when sound engineer Trevor (Gabriel Paul) and crew member Annie (Catherine Dryden) 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 both the actors and Nigel Hook’s misbehaving set, but delightfully observed send-ups of actor types abound too.

Benjamin McMahon is particular splendid as Dennis Tyde, playing the butler Perkins, sending up actors who mispronounce words almost beyond recognition, while Pontefract's Bobby Hirston is a blast as stage debutant Max, recalling actors that play to the audience, not the script, forever stepping out of character.

Spinning so many plates at once, Mark Bell's cast builds and builds the momentum of a Mischievous misadventure that makes going Wrong a right laugh, even more so than at York Theatre Royal in 2014.

The Play That Goes Wrong goes wrong at Grand Opera House, York, until tomorrow (Saturday). It will then go wrong again at Hull New Theatre, from May 21 to 26, and Bradford Alhambra, from June 18 to 23 June, and next year you can bank on more Mischief making at the Grand Opera House in The Comedy About A Bank Robbery from February 5 to 9.