"What is a coarse actor?" Michael Green asks on the dust jacket of his classic book, The Art of Coarse Acting. "He is an actor who can remember his lines but not the order in which they come. An amateur. Often the scenery will fall down. Sometimes the church hall may fall down. Invariably his tights will fall down. His aim is to upstage the rest of the cast."

If you love bumbling bloopers or split your sides every time catastrophe strikes on stage and you double up with delight at missed cues, ham acting, pratfalls, clangers and slapstick and unexpected sight gags, then you are in for an evening of hilarity when the fictional and awfully amateur Poon River Players present The Best of British, written by Alexandra Previn, directed by Steph Roberts and stage managed by a very grumpy Liz St. Clair Long.

Director Chris Baldock and his disastrously funny cast bungle and stumble their way through six spoofs on British repertory drama.

Murder and mayhem drive greed and revenge in Michael Green's Streuth and Trapped. Family fiasco erupts into chaos in Michael Green's A Collier's Tuesday Tea and Rupert Bean's Pride at Southanger Park. Blood spatters the walls in Jane Dewey's descent into the macabre in Present Slaughter and Green's Stalag 69 leaves a hapless British prisoner (Damon Baudin) at the mercy of his captors.

Stereotypes tumble across the stage in a parade of mishaps. Baldock has chosen a cast that play the absurdity and eccentricity with relish, caught in a melee of falling sets, an uncontrolled revolve, histrionic deaths and unexpected accidents, ludicrous delivery of lines and ridiculous shenanigans.

Poon River's Steph Roberts struggles to maintain some semblance of poised control as chaos reigns and her actors turn her production to irredeemable farce. Hats off to the actors and the backstage crew who destroy and speedily reconstruct sets between plays.

Playing comedy is a serious business, and Baldock and his cast play the characters with serious intent.

What is lacking at times is a lightness of touch to tease and tickle the funny bone, with notable exceptions from Cole Hilder in a finely tuned Noel Coward spoof, Baudin as the imprisoned airman and Meaghan Stewart as a flighty French maid.

Repeating Stalag 69, albeit with different gags, seemed somewhat superfluous. Milking a gag is a clever comic device but only if it surprises and rouses fresh laughter.

This aside, the laughter on opening night was unstoppable, the business was carefully and cleverly staged and both the audience with a taste for calamity comedy and the actors revelled in the folly and frantic antics of the Poon River Players.

Canberra Rep's production offers a night of nonsensical entertainment with a touch of awkward recognition for those for whom the coarse actor's cap fits