Tamzin Outhwaite and Roger Allam in Boeing-Boeing

As with much farce, the structure is blissfully simple, people's pronouncements existing so that their very opposite can be proven. You know, for instance, that Allam's Bernard is setting himself up for a comic fall when he boasts about the ease with which he juggles the three women in his life: air hostesses all, whose traffic patterns in and out of his bedroom(s) can be assessed from the timetables of Lufthansa, Alitalia or TWA. It helps, of course, that Rob Howell's creamy, curvilinear set—'60s period-perfect down to the day-glo telephone and the spherical lights descending from the ceiling—has no shortage of doors, a fact that proves terrifically useful once the ladies' plans start going awry and mass convergence—and chaos—ensue. Luckily, too, for Bernard, he finds a game ally-cum-romantic competitor in the visiting Robert, whom Rylance plays with a fluty Welsh accent so as to approximate in U.K. terms this Frenchman's much-vaunted status as someone from the regions. (Robert is from Aix, as he never stops reminding us, though specifically which Aix is just one of the many sources of confusion on which Beverley Cross's fleet translation of the Gallic text thrives.)

Frances de la Tour in Boeing-Boeing

Also on hand to abet Bernard's game plan is de la Tour's classically hangdog domestic, who's kind enough to cook up a meal befitting the nationality of whichever woman is due for an assignation next but not so great a patsy that she's above pressing near the end for a 40% pay rise. Her head seemingly permanently slouched, the actress has never got more mileage out of that singular basset hound demeanor, not to mention a weary shuffle that seems to slow her gait in inverse proportion to the manic unfolding of events around her. It was evident well before The History Boys that de la Tour can scoop up—or stop—pretty much any show with one sweep of those baleful eyes, but her performance here constitutes a master class in comedy to which even those phobic of farce owe it to themselves to bear witness.

[AD]The others are very good, too, even if an ever wide-eyed Rylance, in his first London stage turn since leaving his artistic directorship of Shakespeare's Globe, occasionally gives off the air of someone who has studied his every response just a tad too much; with farce, one must never see the calculation. Marking a total about-face from his scorching turn this time last year in Blackbird, Allam has what may be an even more exhausting assignment keeping Camoletti's plot airborne, and there's one delicious moment in which he literally seems blown across the stage by the exigencies of the narrative. (I also liked the moment requiring Bernard suddenly to adopt the chop-socky mannerisms of a kung fu master: don't ask.) As for the women, a game Tamzin Outhwaite delivers the second overemphatic American accent of the week (the first belongs to Ed Stoppard's Tom in The Glass Menagerie), though her TWA employee makes a bid for the power of the American female that I dare say registers still. Daisy Beaumont is an apt Latin spitfire—temperament, libido, and all—as the preferred of Bernard's distaff trio, while Gomez nearly matches de la Tour belly laugh for belly laugh as the most ferocious of the lot: a German woman whose teeth would seem forever bared for action, notwithstanding legs possessed of their own formidable cut and thrust. Stepping back from the whole, I share a friend's quandary about a title that by rights ought logically to be Boeing-Boeing-Boeing, no? But what difference; you'll be laughing too hard, or at least I was, to start applying the rules of logic, though one thing's for sure: The Lord of the Rings was never like this.

Boeing-Boeing
By Marc Camoletti in a translation by Beverley Cross
Directed by Matthew Warchus
Comedy Theatre