I’ve always liked Pajama Men. Mark Chavez  and Shenoah Allen’s physical antics and interaction can be mesmerising, inventive and surprising. They have mixed narrative and sketch format in the past but in their 2 Man 3 Musketeers they go a few steps further, playing fast and loose with D’Artagnan & co’s adventures by Dumas.

And this time around I’m not sure if it works. I’m no expert of French literature but I get the impression they have been less than faithful to the text. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that but by messing with it they miss out on dramatic tension. We basically get the story of D’Artagnan leaving his farm to become a musketeer and a brief story about royal jewels being stolen, but then it all seems to fizzle out without really building to a climax. My swash remained largely unbuckled.

The good stuff is not their Reduced Shakespeare Company-style distilling of the story but their trademark imagination. Their “chair mullet” - basically a chair worn as headgear - is almost worth the ticket price alone. There is some neat flirty, runaround improv in a bustling marketplace with a hint of Duncan “chase me” Norvelle about it. And there is quite a lot of comical riding on the back of a centaur.

But the self-contained inspired moments fail to pull things together to make a cohesive whole. I don’t like to be negative about such talented performers but for me the scene that had the most resonance was the one where they played confused audience members who wanted to sneak out early.

Until Oct 8 then touring. Details here.