Giles Woodforde attends Chipping Norton Theatre's performance of an amusing Michael Frayn production

Nothing, ever, will beat Michael Frayn’s Noises Off for sheer comic mayhem, and ability to reduce audiences to hysterically laughing jellies. But his set of sketches, Alarms and Excursions, comes close at times. “This is going to be one of the great evenings,” announces a dinner party host with swaggering confidence.

As he wrestles with a ridiculously complicated corkscrew, you can be sure that the evening will indeed be memorable, but not for the reasons the host has in mind, as faulty smoke alarms and bleeping oven timers increasingly dominate the proceedings.

Frayn wrote the sketch in 1998, and already humankind is at the mercy of technology. Later, we return to the dinner party just as the guests utter the immortal words: “Oh, look at the time, is it really that late?” The relief on the hosts’ faces is very visible. But, of course, the guests don’t actually leave, and further disasters follow.

In this Chippy in-house production, John Terry directs six of the original eight sketches with panache and expert comic timing. Gone are skits about aircraft safety announce-ments, and the perils of working from TV autocue devices.

But very much present is my favourite: two couples who have never met before pitch up in a holiday hotel somewhere abroad. The wall between their adjoining bedrooms is paper-thin. One couple suffers an invasion of mosquitoes, and attempts to swat them are inevitably assumed by the couple next door to be a noisy and kinky sex session. The awkward atmosphere at breakfast the next morning is splendidly conveyed by the cast: Charlie Buckland, Eliot Giuralarocca, Kate Copeland and Kali Peacock, who are first-rate throughout.

Underneath great farce there’s always pathos, and in Alarms and Excursions Frayn highlights the failure of human beings to communicate properly with each other. This is mercilessly observed in the final sketch, in which a German guest awaits collection at the airport. “I vill vait at Terminal 1,” he yells at a telephone answering machine.

But his host has already set out for Gatwick, where there is no Terminal 1.