The Orange Tree is renowned for its fruitful rummaging in theatrical archives but the jewels it unearths tend to date from the Edwardian era.

How satisfying then to find a revival of this bracing 1957 satire, first performed at the Royal Court to echoes of the religious uproar that surrounded JM Synge’s Playboy of the Western World.

Nigel Dennis’s well-hit target, increasingly pertinent these days, is religious extremism, and the way seemingly rational human beings can suddenly be swept up in the furore of faith. In an ambassadorial villa “some time in our recent colonial past”, Frederick and Elizabeth Compton are preparing to leave their posting.

Frederick’s legacy is a new dam, yet the building thereof has “suffocated” the ages-old river god. Anxious not to leave the people bereft, the Comptons hatch a tongue-in-cheek plan. “Freddie’s going to knock a small god together, to replace the one he broke,” announces Elizabeth dryly.

It’s in this first act, with the Brits condescendingly cutting and pasting local myths and Biblical stories, that Dennis and director Sam Walters have most fun. Thereafter matters turn serious and deadly, as the Brits, unlike the “natives”, go native with the cult of Moo, named dismissively after the garden cows. This new religion, suggests Dennis witheringly, is no more or less absurd than those we already have, and by the end has assumed the superstructure of organised, national worship.

Philip York has a nicely sardonic line as Frederick but it’s Amanda Royle’s Elizabeth who is the show’s high priestess, moving from scepticism to sensual abandon to finish as a bespectacled matriarch squinting over her self-created holy land. Impressive.
Until 12 December. Information:
020 8940 3633. www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk