The Oxford Playhouse hosted a performance by the Barbershopera musical theatre quartet this week – an energetic, irreverent take on Alexandre Dumas' classic, The Three Musketeers, recreated by Barbershopera's founders Sarah Tipple, Rob Castell and Tom Sadler.

It's a Blackadder-esque parody with added vocal harmonies and with Anglo-French rivalry as its main motif. The protagonist d'Artagnan is recast as the peasant girl Nicole (Laura Darton) who sets out – in male disguise – to enlist the musketeers in freeing her country from the burden of an embargo on English desserts! A breathless hour and a half of absurd hilarity follows.

The elaborate plot of the original novel is boiled down to its absolute essentials and the four actors brilliantly manage the eight main characters between them. The limitations of a small cast are turned to comedic advantage as the story's classic love triangle is condensed into one single scandalous affair in which King Louis XIII (Pete Sorel-Cameron, doubling as Aramis) is nearly exposed for fraternising with the flamboyant Duke of Buckingham (Russell Walker, doubling as Athos). Meanwhile, Harry Stone (Porthos) doubles as Milady and all minor female characters to great comic effect.

Though at times the play appears to be wavering between puerile crudeness and, at the other extreme, gender-political moralism, it continually dissolves into delightful, innocent silliness. While perhaps less witty than Blackadder, it is even more sustainedly tongue-in-cheek. The songs include many a catchy caricature, and the sublime solo singing by debutante Darton raises this production to new heights.

The Oxford Playhouse proves an ideal venue for a light-hearted French romance. Look out for Barbershopera to return with its next stage musical, hopefully before long.