Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give in completely to the fun, frolics and frantic foolery of The Comedy About Spies from Mischief at the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End. Seriously, the more questions you ask of the piece, the quicker it falls apart.

The team behind The Play That Goes Wrong and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, plus two series of the BBC’s The Goes Wrong Show, are back with a show billed as their most ambitious yet.

I’d been disappointed by Mischief’s previous productions, particularly Groan Ups, which was an odd attempt at more serious theatre. There was one moment at the Theatre Royal in Brighton where a trestle table collapsed and the audience collectively gasped with anticipation, hoping that something funny was coming. Nope. Show stop. Reset. GROAN!

I entered the Adelphi with some trepidation about what was to come.

If laughter were the only measure of success, then the play absolutely fulfils its brief. It is brilliantly funny in places, but the journey to the punchline can feel like a slog.

The problem is consistency. The opening of the show is very strong, but the piece then meanders through comic styles like it’s shopping in IKEA. All the pieces are there to create something sturdy and useful, but no one bothered to read the instructions, so we have a collection of sketches thrown into a confusing and overly complicated story. The instructions are pictures, for heaven’s sake.

The piece leans heavily on familiar callbacks and tried-and-tested sequences that work very well but are stretched almost to breaking point. When the newer material lands, it causes gut-busting outbursts of laughter. The problem is that it can take an awfully long time to reach the punchline, and the payoff doesn’t always justify the journey.

Yet Mischief’s capacity for surprise remains extraordinary. The cast and set pieces are rarely still for long. It boggles the mind how every inch of the stage is used to great effect. Just when you think you’ve cottoned on to the mechanics of a sequence, something moves in a different direction, or a joke turns violently on itself before the punchline.

This is what saves the show from self-destruction.

The enormous Battenberg sequence is a feast for the eyes. 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.

The production demands to keep hurtling forward at breakneck speed, but when forced to switch to a lower gear, it struggles to regain momentum. Effects and scenic transitions could sometimes do with being one or two beats slicker. Despite so much happening in the show, there are pockets where things slow down a little too much, and it feels like the piece is breathing heavily into a paper bag to regulate itself. This is especially apparent when the biggest gags need a few moments to catch up with themselves before ripping once again through walls, windows and the ceiling.

It was an absolute dream to see original Mischief performers in their natural environment. These are performers who have made intricately choreographed chaos look effortless for years, but at the height of this play’s biggest moments, some of the cast look like they’ve been pulled backwards through a bush.

I found myself wondering whether even they were being pushed a little too hard by their own material.

None of this should 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.

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.

Bigger, bolder, badder, wrong…er?