Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give in completely to the fun, frolics and frantic foolery in The Comedy About Spies, the latest outing from Mischief at the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End.

The team behind The Play That Goes Wrong, The Comedy About a Bank Robbery and many other productions, as well as two series of the BBC’s The Goes Wrong Show, strike again. But does this play leave audience members shaken, stirred and stranded on the rocks, or is it in fact time to die for Mischief’s familiar formulas?

This is the first Mischief production I’ve attended since Groan Ups and The Mind Mangler, neither of which really resonated with me. Theatre is subjective. Sometimes your life is changed and sometimes you feel short-changed. I was incredibly excited to step back into the magic of a company widely considered the modern masters of stage comedy.

If laughter alone were the only metric measured, then the play absolutely fulfils its brief. I laughed a lot, but that doesn’t inherently mean the piece succeeds as theatre. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad play. At its best, The Comedy About Spies is up there with some of Mischief’s finest work. The problem is consistency.

Mischief trades on familiar callbacks and tried and tested sequences that already work, but are then extended, stretched and abused to within inches of their lives, all whilst hurling completely new weapons of hysterical laughter into the arsenal. When that formula works, it really works. There are genuinely gut-busting moments throughout the piece, including several that caught me completely off guard.

But there comes a point where you have to pull a Becky Hill and say, “We’re not doing greatest hits anymore.”

Despite a fantastic opening, the play quickly swings towards familiar beats, tropes and gags. There is one joke performed in at least four different ways, another that feels like the butt of its own punchline, and the play can never quite decide whether it respects the fourth wall or not.

Yet Mischief’s capacity for surprise remains extraordinary. Both cast and set pieces are rarely still for long, and it is slightly mind-blowing that every inch of each location and virtually every prop is used in ways you never quite see coming. Even when things become predictable, something moves in a different direction or a joke takes a turn before the punchline. This, I would argue, is what just about saves the show from itself.

The production demands to keep hurtling forward, but when forced to switch to a lower gear it struggles to maintain momentum. Effects and scenic transitions could sometimes do with being one or two beats slicker, leaving the play occasionally gasping for air.

Nowhere is that more apparent than during the enormous Battenberg sequence. Four rooms across two levels become the playground for an increasingly insane bedroom farce. When it’s full steam ahead, it works phenomenally. The cast tear through an extraordinary collection of overlapping jokes, but the sequence overstays its welcome. Whenever the play slows to service the plot, its momentum dies and then struggles to find itself again.

It was an absolute dream to see original Mischief alumni in their natural environment. These are performers who have made intricately choreographed chaos look effortless for years, but at the height of the play’s biggest moments, some of the cast look like they’ve been pulled backwards through a bush. For perhaps the first time, I found myself wondering whether even they were being pushed a little too hard by their own material.

That should not detract from the technical achievement involved. This may well be Mischief’s most ambitious production in terms of scale, and there are moments of genuine genius on that stage. Act Two comes with twists, turns, twists on those turns and turns on those twists, and despite my misgivings, works very well.

At one point, the show absolutely gaslit me into making up an entire plot point, only to deliver the truth later and leave me hysterical. I audibly said “Oh no!” before pushing myself back into my seat with embarrassment. When Mischief can still do that to someone familiar with their tricks, there is clearly plenty of magic left.

To be clear, I had an enjoyable evening at the theatre. I just wanted and expected more boundaries to be pushed in a play openly billed as their most ambitious piece yet.

That is ultimately my frustration with The Comedy About Spies. Mischief have pushed the scale, spectacle and physical possibilities of their work further, but I’m not convinced they’ve pushed their comic language quite as far alongside it.

It’s such a shame you can’t bottle up the experience of seeing Mischief for the first time and release it again whenever needed. I know this company has so much more to give. Bigger, bolder, better, badder, wrong…er?