I shall be surprised (and very pleased) if I see a funnier and more entertaining stage production this year than the spirited revival of Neil Simon’s hit The Odd Couple being staged at the Mill at Sonning, under the practised hand of director Anthony Valentine.

A Broadway smash in 1965, the brilliantly crafted play — perhaps the wittiest work of a renowned master of wit — went on to become the West End’s hot ticket the following year (when its main commercial rival was Olivier’s Othello). Since then, its profile has remained high as a consequence of Gene Saks’s 1968 film version starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon as the ill-matched flat-mates whose domestic discord provides the meat of the drama.

It is hardly a coincidence, I think, that the leading actors in the Mill’s production, Terence Booth and Martyn Stanbridge, bear more than a passing resemblance to the Hollywood stars.

Mr Booth, doubtless to his relief, does not possess quite the weatherworn, hangdog appearance of Matthau — does anyone? — but to hear him speak you might think you were in the presence of that master of the put-down quip. His impeccable timing in his droll one-liners is apparent from the first scene in which his character, divorced sports writer Oscar, is hosting — hardly the mot juste, I recognise — a poker party in his ill-kempt New York apartment.

“Please hold the cards up; I can’t see where I marked them earlier,” he orders his guests, among whom Jeff Mash’s good-sort cop Murray and Tom Bevan’s quarrelsome bad loser Speed are the most easily recognisable as types.

Missing from the group is Felix (Mr Stanbridge), who eventually turns up at the apartment, seemingly suicidal, after breaking up with his wife. In the interests of his safety, he is invited to stay.

Unwisely, as it turns out, for this fastidious, houseproud hypochondriac proves to be precisely what the slobbish Oscar does not require about him. Their deteriorating relationship reaches rock-bottom after a hilariously mismanaged double-date with a pair of simpering British sisters (Susan Skipper and Carla de Wansey).

‘Where do you get your ideas?” one ludicrously asks Felix on learning he is a writer . . . of news bulletins. When he shares his marital sorrow with them, however, all three dissolve into floods of tears, and the happy night Oscar planned is ruined.

After this debacle, another ‘divorce’ is inevitable.

Until August 22. Tickets: Tel. 0118 969 8000