The Ealing Inheritance is a free hand rummage through old acting chests of the famous 1950s British film studios.

Up come echoes of Dennis Price and Boccherini: on stage is a whacky vicar (dead), frighteningly plain spinster (alive), and two very inefficient burglars.

The surreal plot involves a cast of four in a fake courtship, missing inheritance and lost brother (dead again). It’s all violently exaggerated, theatrical to the point of absurdity and enormous fun.

Writer Simon Messingham stars as Price, the central villain of the piece, demonstrating that time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

But logic plays no part here. Sweetly dotty Felicity is a wonderful creation who flits around with an assegai and her mother’s lipstick while younger sister Emma, fetchingly clad in knickerbockers and filthy cardigan, assaults her reluctant bridegroom.

An apprentice criminal is poisoned accidentally but not before employing rock star skills with a microphone.

We are in no very clear time or space: mobile telephones jar nicely with shrunken heads and tea trolleys and the set is neutrally domestic.

But it’s a very promising debut from a kindly Dyke Road mob, aka Button Pressed Productions.

Four stars