The Fall Guy, Royal Exchange, Manchester

A complete and utter farce

What's the difference between French farce and English? asks Matthew Lloyd, director of The Fall Guy. He answers: "Sex! The action is driven much more exclusively by the libido of the characters.'' How's that again? In this Feydeau farce, Le Dindon, of 1896, two of the female characters are motivated by revenge, cold-bloodedly announcing to the nearest man, "Take me!'' to punish their unfaithful husbands.

Another, less interested in sex than power, gets her way through threats and blackmail. And Crépin Vatelin, her victim, the centre of this whirligig, just wants to stay home with the wife he adores. English playwrights in the 17th century turned out mordant satires with material like this, but Feydeau's tone is crass, his construction slovenly.

Ernest, the unsuccessful suitor of Crépin's wife, Lucienne, encounters Armandine, a squeaky blonde fluffball. After an energetic night, he gets his servants to put her out with the rubbish when Lucienne arrives unexpectedly, offering herself. To his chagrin, Ernest finds he is no use at all. The character of Armandine could have been replaced by a bout of masturbation. The elderly major who grabs women's bottoms as soon as his wife's back is turned is another candidate for oblivion, this time on grounds of taste.

The wife doesn't hear the women squeal because – she's deaf! Comic genius, eh? The deaf wife (also troubled by that hilarious French malady, flatulence) causes consternation in a hotel by unwittingly setting off an alarm that she can't hear. But there's no pay-off to this momentary panic – when the guests rush from their rooms, no one is caught out, and no plot device is set in motion. Nor is there any emotional satisfaction – the deaf woman's mishap doesn't turn the tables on her contemptuous husband.

Lloyd's production is set in the 1950s, when cinched waists and out-thrust bosoms echoed the styles of the Naughty Nineties. But, while Ashley Martin-Davis's costumes are quite droll the low, slim-line furniture of the period is no more made for this play than the stage of the Royal Exchange.

Presenting a French farce at a theatre in the round is a heroic idea, but all the new doors can't compensate for the feeling of compression to bursting point one gets from a mad world contained in the conventional three walls.

Ben Porter is a charmingly petulant Ernest. How, he berates Lucienne, could she love a man with a nose like her husband's: "My nose, on the other hand, is just right. It is a nose made for love.'' As the uxorious Crépin, David Fielder is as comic as he is sympathetic, desperately fighting to retain his marriage, his sanity, and his trousers.

The high spots of the evening, though, are the appearances of Katy Carmichael as Crépin's Nemesis, a Viennese vamp whose passion for her "little piglet'' drives her into a frenzy of grunting and snorting. Her lip-licking demands to the trembling Crepin to "come and canoodle with your little Kneidel'' makes up for a lot of this sad testament to the coarse, smug tastes of play-goers a century ago.

To 11 August (0161-833 9833)