We were amid the splendours of Christ Church for Murder in the Cathedral last week. This week, in a move from the sacred to the profane, the venue for Playhouse Plays Out (and three further sell-out shows) was the exceptionally welcoming Angel and Greyhound pub in St Clement’s (host Richard Gibson). This well-conceived Oxford Playhouse programme certainly rings the changes.

A Western is the work of Action Hero — the Bristol-based duo of Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse — and has toured successfully for the past couple of years at home and abroad. It is a slight, 50-minute work in which we are shown — with much squirting of tomato ketchup and a deadpan drollery in delivery — some of the clichés of cowboy life, at least as it is depicted on screen.

This is a theme often explored in the past, most notably of course by Mel Brooks and team in Blazing Saddles. But there is no reason why we should not savour its examination again, especially when it is done, as here, with such brio and ready wit.

James and Gemma played out the action all around us as we drank, he as the hatted hero, among other male roles, she (as we were told) in the only female part that the genre permits — that of a whore.

The show is divided into a series of episodes, all illustrating activities immediately recognisable to anyone familiar with the screen western. They included, for instance, “the hero shoots at a bandit’s feet forcing him to dance”, “the card table gets turned over” and “the bad guys laugh”. That last meant participation from the audience as the bad guys. Who they? After a long, long list James concluded: “Anyone who is not American.”

We also made a valuable contribution to “hero walks into bar and everyone stops talking”, and I dare say our shouts of “Yee-ha!” could be heard half way down St Clement’s — where James’s appearance on a tiny bicycle ‘steed’ also raised eyebrows. Great fun.