I cannot remember experiencing a West End evening of such sheer, silly, comic pleasure.
To think that what reduced me to make such a giggling, smiling, delighted spectacle of myself was this traditional French farce by Marc Camoletti, neatly translated by Beverley Cross.
The play's plot depends upon bad-luck and unreliable aircraft, those eternal facts of life.
So three air hostesses - an American, German and Italian - unaware they are each engaged to the same businessman, a maestro of suave smugness, Roger Allam's Bernard, land in his Parisian flat in risky succession.
This triple-timing sexual deceiver is abetted by Robert, his shy, sexually famished friend, whom Mark Rylance brings to timid life in an astonishing performance of comic alarms, initiations and deceptions.
Robert wastes little time in responding to one of the hostesses' advances. Meanwhile, the two men, with Frances de la Tour's comic tour de force of a housekeeper in glum, grudging support, deploy emergency procedures to ensure the women do not crash into each other and destroy Bernard's smooth-running life of parallel engagements.
De la Tour's Bertha, glad to be rude and viewing the sexual goings-on with morose, aggressive distaste, turns each withering line to perfection.
It sounds like a standard recipe for an old-fashioned French sex-farce, with an apartment boasting bedrooms, into which girls have either to be quickly stuffed or prevented from looking.
And Boeing Boeing does indeed go in for dated gender stereotyping. Never mind. It works like a comic dream.
Male fear of being sexually found out motors the plot into overdrive and anxiety. The beglamoured air hostesses appear eager to be one-man women, while Bernard in a way acceptable to the French male but still frowned on in Britain, settles down to strictly rationed promiscuity, in the form of multiple engagements.
Conventionally staged and equipped with farce-prone actors, Boeing Boeing would not take improper comic flight.
Thanks, though, to Matthew Warchus's deliciously acted, psychologically nuanced production, with Rylance's inspired characterisation of Robert as a sweet, strange sexual innocent, desperate to try his hand, this Boeing Boeing is pitched more as sexual comedy than situation farce. It works wonders. Only Allam's surprisingly dull, ponderous Bernard fails to make the comic grade.
Rylance's Robert first appears all dressed down and weird in shades of clashing brown, a vague smile fixed upon his face, a mackintosh on his arm and the air of funny-peculiar clinging to him.
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He peers with unashamed interest at Allam's cocky businessman in a fiancée-clinch and when Michelle Gomez's butch, superbly imperious hostess, Gretchen, mistakes his towel-covered head for Bernard's and plunges her tongue into his astonished mouth, the first practical stage of his sexual education is launched.
Determined but fearful of Bernard's exposure even while he dallies with his host's women, who eventually emerge as mistresses of their own destiny, Rylance's Robert teeters grave, passive and delightful through the action until he reaches his goal of an S and M union with Gretchen.
He peddles a fine line in desperation: he bars the bedroom to hostesses on grounds that proclaim his weirdness, falsely owns up to airline bags of intimate ladies' clothing as if a part-time cross-dresser.
He submits to Tamzin Outhwaite's tart American hostess, who treats him as a kissing machine, in submissive amazement.It's the comic performance of a life-time.
Boeing Boeing
The Harold Pinter Theatre
Panton Street, SW1Y 4DN
