Sussex indie legends The Indelicates may have a new album to shill, but true to form there was no mention of it at frontman Simon Indelicate’s rough-hewn and hilarious post-modern biblical musical The Book Of Job.

A cast of hundreds, elaborate stage directions, the majesty of diamond-encrusted heaven and the terror of flame-licked hell were all ironically alluded to in narrated stage directions rather than being realised, and all were funnier for it.

This light-hearted musical retelling of a wager between God and Satan for the soul of Job saw the poor man suffer penury, the death of his children, and a crop of diseases so numerous they allowed for a full-scale Technicolour Dreamcoat homage ending “you’ll have tears, and nausea, and flushes, and pox and FLU!”

Satan, played oleaginously by Simon Indelicate, had all the best tunes (of course), including a first-act showstopper with lyrics rewritten for each reprise of this musical, first performed, in Brighton, in 2005.

But the timbre and solemnity of Chris Hodges’ baritone gave Job echoes of Colm Wilkinson’s Valjean at times, an occasionally poignant counterpoint to the laughter and mockery of the plight of this broken “great man of the East.”

Self-referential without being self-reverential, ironic and postmodern while remaining self-aware, biblically accurate but laugh-out-loud funny throughout, this is a show which seems to get better each time it is staged … just as long as The Indelicates never get the funding for all those elaborate sets.

Four stars