I want to see flashing blue lights in Waterloo Road. Signs in livid neon should warn innocent theatregoers: "Major Theatrical Hazard Ahead for three hours. Deep Disappointments Expected. Beware of Extreme Boredom. Take diversions or drive through Mirth-Free Zone."

For David Lan has picked up a humour and wit bypass kit to direct a revival of Thomas Otway's Restoration comedy, The Soldiers' Fortune, in which penniless soldiers Captain Beauregard and Courtine return from the wars with small hope of turning their misfortunes into fortune.

The production, which slips between silly burlesque, grotesque pantomime and heavy labour farce, to an accompaniment of ranting and raving, leaves no unfunny turn untouched.

If there have been less amusing classic comedy revivals since the Eighties I have luckily missed them.

Lan describe the play as one which "feeds on trauma, bewilderment and rage", though it is more likely audience members will have these emotions thrust upon them.

The action depends upon familiar Restoration comedy themes and ideals: a lucrative marriage or the poorer alternative of intermittent sexual bliss with someone else's partner.

A complex love-chase, turned farcical, depends upon picture-portrait, ring, supposed ghost and lover masquerading as corpse during a bedroom emergency.

So the bland, irritable Beauregard of Ray Fearon, whose six-pack stomach gives the one satisfying performance, attempts to win the willing, waiting hand of Anne-Marie Duff's wooden Lady Dunce.

Miss Duff's character, locked in loveless marriage to Oliver Ford Davies's jealous Sir Davey, remains stranded in listlessness, while David Bamber's gay voyeur Sir Jolly Jumble schemes to bring them together.

In parallel to these would-be lovers' attempts at intimacy, Alec Newman's forever furious Courtine, sporting the silliest slip of a beard, conducts a ponderous Beatrice and Benedict courtship with Kananu Kirimi's muted Sylvia and wins this five thousand pound girl.

Otway as comic dramatist is no Congreve or Etherege. He lacks verbal flair. His characters, Sir Jolly apart, strike few original sparks. His situation comedy strikes out in unadventurous language.

Lan's heavy-weather, lumbering production is hampered by Lizzie Clachan's unwieldy set: a wooden stairway on a proscenium stage leads down to the arena playing-area, where more wide steps serve, bizarrely, as a bedroom.

A small band sits below the proscenium, distracting audience attention and sometimes supplying anachronistic musical interludes.

The play calls for comedians of Lee Evans's resource or actors of Mark Rylance's comic potency. These actors succumb to silly grotesqueries when trying to be funny.

The acting style is worst characterised by Bamber's Sir Jolly. Bamber, who long ago cornered the market in effeminate, gay men, gives his usual, ghastly pantomimic performance in this genre. He flounces around, with hands that wave, jerk, shudder, shake and tremble, his voice pitched in camp gabbling and gurgling.

This burlesque - a maligning caricature - destroys Jolly's comic potential as a floundering, voyeuristic, all-purpose procurer.

Ford Davies, at first peddling a nice line in devious artfulness, mislays his comic touch and lurches around in high-rant mode. Gruesome.