Last year, the Bush struck summer silly season gold when it transferred 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, a compendium sketch show commissioned by the Latitude Festival, to its home base. Quite sensibly, it is repeating the formula, which results in London audiences getting to see a perky gang-show hour about looking foolish in a whole range of ways.

Five young writers — Zawe Ashton, James Graham, Joel Horwood, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Michelle Terry — tackle staple topics such as sex, bodily functions and the ageing process with undoubted vigour and an understandable preference for the humorous. Nonetheless, the piece is crying out for one hand to shape it overall and to prevent odd lurches of tone such as the Best Man’s speech that takes a turn for the far-too-dark side.

The writers are fortunate that four enormously game performers (Kathryn Drysdale, Katie Lyons, Felix Scott and Hugh Skinner) are prepared to risk their own dignity in Anthea Williams’s production, in order to salvage some overlong and under‑funny contributions.

There’s not quite the riotous sense of enjoyment that Ralf Little and his team brought to proceedings last year, although Lyons, one of the most natural comedy performers I’ve seen in ages, is a tremendous find. In one of the ongoing strands that niftily weaves through the hour, she plays an audacious lass who lays into the wrong guy in a bar and then fails, excruciatingly, brilliantly and continuously, to make amends.

There’s also a deliciously offbeat retail-themed duologue which has street-talkin’, bling-wearing Iceland (the impressive Skinner) brandishing “pizza kebabs” and lording it over old-fashioned Woolworths (Scott). Roll on the next instalment in the franchise.
Until 15 August (020 8743 5050, www.bushtheatre.co.uk).