Directed by Dean Paul Gibson. An Arts Club production at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Wednesday, September 16. Continues until October 11

There’s so much riotous fun in this double bill it feels like the circus has come to town.

The enthusiasm and sheer volume of Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe’s opening sound cue roll over the audience like an orchestral wave that throws us up against the energetic abstraction of a huge backdrop painted by set designer Ted Roberts in the manner of Wassily Kandinsky.

Characters enter and we’re in the world of Anton Chekhov’s late-19th-century farce The Marriage Proposal. Under Dean Paul Gibson’s direction, it’s bloody fantastic.

Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov, a nervous and hypochondriacal landowner, has come to ask the blessing of his neighbour so he can marry the neighbour’s daughter, Natalia. But deep and irrational feelings get in the way.

Simon Bradbury is lovely as the pompous father, but it’s Sasa Brown’s Natalia and Jeff Meadows’s Ivan that you really want to watch. These two are superlative clowns, absolutely committed to their characters’ voracious emotional appetites. Just wait till you see how they play with rhythms, changing directions on two wheels—sometimes in the middle of sentences or words. And their physical business is superb. Meadows has a riot with Ivan’s complaints, including the sudden and inexplicable loss of the use of one leg.

After the interval, we flash forward to the late-1960s setting of Peter Shaffer’s farce Black Comedy.

A young London artist named Brindsley and his girlfriend Carol want to impress Carol’s strict father and a billionaire art buyer, who are coming over for drinks, so they steal fancy furniture from Brindsley’s gay neighbour Harold, and furnish Brindsley’s flat with it. Then the power goes out—which means that the lights come on for the audience—and we spend much of the rest of the play watching characters try to get away with things in the dark.

Because Harold comes home unexpectedly, a lot of this—and the best of it—has to do with Brindsley trying to return the furniture to Harold’s flat without anybody knowing. As Brindsley, Charlie Gallant does an acrobatic job with the physical comedy. And Nicola Lipman is stellar as Miss Furnival, a supposedly teetotal neighbour who sees darkness as an opportunity to get sauced.

Meadows plays Harold expertly, but, as written, the character is a disappointingly stereotypical fag, a pathetic queen caught in an eddy of unrequited love for Brindsley.

Black Comedy, which is about twice as long as The Marriage Proposal, doesn’t sustain itself as well. Farce is best when it’s physical—and fast. Still, in this evening, it’s almost always fun.