IT may well be Out of Order, but it didn’t stop the brilliant Addingham audience from laughing like drains throughout this hilarious play.

Ray Cooney’s fabulous farce is set in the Westminster hotel, just a stone’s throw from parliament and almost in earshot of the division bell. However, even at this distance there is plenty of political intrigue.

Richard Willey MP (Dick to his friends), is doing his best to have an affair with a secretary who inconveniently is from the other side of the house. On arriving at the venue for their lustful liaison, they find an uninvited guest is already occupying the love nest. As a further passion killer, he is dead. So, what was going to be a quick bit of a political side dish, rapidly becomes something likely to cause a scandal to derail the party.

It would be a very short play indeed if the MP had chosen to do the right thing and let the hotel manager and the police know, so instead, it's the thing that we’re all used to – cover up, cover up, lies and deception. And of course, the tangled web is destined to get worse – and a lot funnier!

Ian Taylor is the archetypal Tory cad Willey, leading astray the naïve secretary Jane Worthington (Becky Hill). Of course, they’re both married and it will perhaps come as no surprise, that both their spouses make an appearance. Pamela Willey ( Adie Smith) is everything you’d expect a home counties MP’s wife to be – until she very much isn’t and Jane’s husband Ronnie (David Tomlinson) is not to be messed with - or so he’d have you believe!

It only gets more complicated. The hotel manager (Gordon Justham) is desperately trying – and failing – to run a respectable business and the waiter (Hugh Lambert), is endlessly on hand to meet the needs of the guests and receive considerable credit for it. These are two great parts and they are played with wonderful understated, dry humour which is the perfect antidote to the frenetic panic of everyone else on stage.

George Pidgen, Willey’s Personal Private Secretary, had no idea what he was getting into when he was summoned to the hotel, rather than going home to mother and her nurse Gladys (Lucy Steer). George (Damien Burras) starts out as a rather wet character who, over the course of the evening transforms into the hottest stud in town – and really surprises himself into the bargain!

This is farce at its best : characters are attributed different names and relationships to try and disguise what’s going on; there are people running in and out of rooms through doors and windows, and there always seems to be someone hidden in the wardrobe! Exasperation, deceit, threats of violence, greater threats of passion and a very brief episode of streaking! Jane Aldridge has done a great job of directing it.

It runs at Addingham Memorial Hall until Saturday – grab a ticket if you can, you’ll be glad you did.