It’s awards season in movie land, so it seems fitting that an award-winning classic film should be resurrected on stage. It’s rare that a comedy gets such accolades; humour can be notoriously as tricky to do as serious drama, if not trickier. It’s just curiously less respected. Alas, this production shows the many pitfalls of trying to stage a comedy.

Set in Philadelphia society, the play tells the story of Tracy Lord (Anne-Marie Oreskovich), who is on the eve of her second marriage. But things start to unfurl when a dirt-digging reporter enters the scene, posing as a pal of her brother. His insistent questions, and the metaphorical cat he puts among the pigeons of high society, cause Tracy to start questioning herself, and her motivations, behind the marriage. As people from Tracy’s past start arriving for the ceremony, she realises she is going to face some unwelcome confrontations.

The play is part screwball comedy, part farce. In some ways it’s a belated American riposte to the turn of the century dramatics of Oscar Wilde. A comedy of manners set in the upper echelons, it sees the nasty aftermath of a battle of the egos. Buried underneath the catty and snide debris is essentially a fairly traditional romantic comedy, with two of the central characters, Tracy and her ex-husband C. K. Dexter Haven (William Spray) , faintly resembling Beatrice and Benedick from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

It’s an unusually stripped- down production. The set is fairly sparse and clean, and the lack of period music and elegant clothing could be interpreted as either unfussy or lazy. The piece demands the players to have a natural, sustained rhythmic delivery of the lines, and unfortunately the cast don’t quite capture this. Owing to this lack of musicality and subtle cadence, some of the humour tends to fall flat. Also, the range of accents and acting styles is hardly uniform, and the result can be jarring.

This play is a perennial favourite, and one drenched in sharp comic observation. This production doesn’t quite capture its essence. It runs until Saturday at the OFS.