Richard Lutz watches a perfect rendition of an absolute tour de farce. 

We are ordered to toddle down to the Birmingham Hippodrome to review a monumentally bad comedy. And being loyal and thoroughly cowed, we accept our marching orders for the riotous The Play That Goes Wrong. Actually, we find it’s the play that goes right as this comedy of big errors is a tour de farce about a bunch of am-dram hams who take a left turn to disaster.

Silliness abounds. Every prop breaks, every stage cue is ignored, every set collapses as the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society ruins, to our delight, Murder at Haversham Manor.

The Play That Goes Wrong is, in short, a chaotic winner, a fractured spoof of how every mistake in the book can wreck a creaky old melodrama. It’s funny, it’s dumb, and there’s nothing like a full crowd laughing its socks off. As for the whodunnit? Who cares. We walked out with a smile after a night of chaos, carefully crafted calamity and a salted caramel ice cream to boot. Can’t beat that.

On until tonight, www.birminghamhippodrome.com