Noises Off, the daddy of all farces, by Michael Frayn, has had audiences in stitches for more than 40 years - but this is, by all accounts, the first time it’s been performed in the round.

Of course, if you’re going to stage anything in this format there is no better place than Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, which has a legitimate claim to be the venue where the mould was first broken this side of the Atlantic.

But how would this tightly-structured play outside a play, this farce about a farce, fare in transition. How would the things that go wrong, the tricks the magician appears to mess up but doesn’t, work when so fully exposed in 360-degree vision?

The answer is that in the adroit hands of the SJT’s brilliant Artistic Director, Paul Robinson, this is a resounding triumph, ferociously funny and fast paced, positively stuffed with laughs from beginning to end. Fresh from his recent success with the almost-as farcical Love’s Labour’s Lost (More or less) he has done it again, got the audience wiping away tears of laughter, hugging their aching sides, rolling in the aisles.

This three-act Olivier-award winner, the most frequently staged comedy in recent years, begins a matter of hours before the opening of a saucy romp - the well-named Nothing On - one of those Ray Cooney-style trouser-droppers, whose star was perhaps on the wane when Frayn decided in 1982 to send up the whole genre with this homage to the joyous unpredictability of live theatre - and conjured up what by common consent is the funniest play ever.

It’s being put on by a totally inept troupe of touring has-beens, wannabe’s no-hopers and martyred veterans - in reality a superb nine-strong ensemble. Physical theatre does require exquisite timing, and there is no room for error especially when getting things ONLY to appear to be going wrong in the midst of mayhem with so much scope for things to actually go badly wrong.

The only time the audience briefly stopped laughing was when the marvellous Alex Phelps, playing the estate agent’s clerk pretending to be the wealthy householder, comes tumbling headfirst downstairs. Could this be one of those Charlie Drake moments when the knockabout clown actually knocked himself out.

No, it was physical theatre at its finest - and most dangerous! And Kevin Jenkins’ ingenious sets, occupying two tiers and giving access to another, unseen, below stage, are a maze of confusion, just perfect to trip up actors who not only haven’t mastered their lines but are also still trying to sequence their entrances and exits. There are lots of doors to slam and jam!

It’s little wonder that the pompous director, Lloyd Dallas, done to a dry comic turn by the well-known television actor Adam Astill, is rapidly running out of patience as he booms out instructions from on high. He does not think much of the script or the actors and would clearly rather be somewhere else. It does not bode well.

Remarkably by the time the second act opens, the play has got through its first month on tour. Not surprisingly, however, tensions have increased alarmingly, not helped by romantic entanglements developing in the most unlikely places - in the not entirely unexpected absence of the director who has moved on to Shakespearean tragedy. We sense the car crash on stage, hear it from backstage rather than see it, as the actors madly scramble to go on and come off.

The story goes that Frayn was inspired to write the play while watching in the wings a farce he’d written for Lynn Redgrave, and sensing that what was happening backstage was far funnier than the play itself.

Act three gives us a chance to catch the play in all its glory, except this is destined to be one bridge too far for the embattled performers. As soon as the housekeeper limps on, we sense things are about to go badly wrong. Susan Twist excels - as ever - as the dotty Dotty Otley playing the equally dotty Mrs Clackett, who by now has just about had enough and seems a prey to the devilish uncoilings of the telephone wire and at the centre of a lot of fishy business.

The young estate agent, he of the forward roll, appears just about on cue, letting himself and Brooke Ashton (the splendid Olivia Woolhouse, seen memorably last year in Ayckbourn’s Show & Tell) into a house he expects to be empty, but that is as slick as it gets. (The rubber-limbed Alex Phelps who spends his time madly running about, going from one pratfall to another must come off exhausted.) The owners, the Brents, appear unexpectedly in every sense, ahead of their cue and literally surprising the would-be lovers.

Valerie Antwi shows a mastery of comic timing as the actress Belinda Blair striving might and main to get back on track, in role as Flavia Brent. Not that she receives any support from her husband, Philip, whose actor, Frederick Fellowes, seems only too keen to criminally step out of role and apologise for his many shortcomings. Andy Cryer, veteran of so many Northern Broadside productions, gives a tour de force as the lame duck, somehow exacting maximum humour from a surfeit of pathos.

That fine character actor, Christopher Godwin, one of this theatre’s favourite sons judging by the vast number of Ayckbourn plays he has appeared in, threatens on a number of occasions to steal the show (and anything that’s loose), as Selsdon Mowbray, another unwanted and unexpected arrival. His presence, drunk or sober, just adds to the pandemonium, further compounded by the unexpected - expect the unexpected - return of the director hoping to quickly tidy up a couple of complications before getting back to serious theatre.

It looks like being quite a year for Annie Kirkman at the SJT, appearing in Godber’s Perfect Pitch and Love’s Labour’s Lost - and she’s still got the panto to come. She is the assistant director of Noises Off, and excels as the much put upon Poppy, Nothing On’s assistant stage manager, not much helped by the Stage Manager Tim Allgood (Charlie Ryan), harried handyman and reluctant understudy.

Suffice it to say, everything that could conceivably go wrong does go wrong, hilariously so. Nothing is as it should be. It’s an epic disaster - and a theatrical triumph. Don’t miss this precision-timed laughter-feste, the funniest thing ever on 18 legs!

Noises Off, by Michael Frayn, is at Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre until 6th September. Box Office: 01723 370541; www.sjt.uk.com