IT was always said Laurence Sterne’s The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was impossible to film. Now we know it can’t be staged either.

Richard Hurford’s post-modern, post-ironic play to mark the 300th anniversary of the loquacious Coxwold vicar’s birth is outwardly an audacious attempt to mount a response to what the brochure calls the “insurmountable” Shandy.

Note that it is a “response” rather than an adaptation of Sterne’s nine volumes from 1759 to 1766. iShandy is, to quote the programme cover, “very loosely based on the novel with footnotes, gratitude, savoury snacks and pregnant pauses”.

Savoury snacks on press night for the centrepiece of the Theatre Royal’s Yorkshire season were of the sausage and rude-shaped variety, in keeping with the saucy but trying-too-hard humour of Hurford’s multi-layered edifice.

On stage the snacks are meaty “testicles” at the soiree being held by Susan (Elizabeth Bower), a member of a teachers’ book club, whose latest choice is Tristram Shandy, much to the mockery of Susan’s wind-up merchant husband Greg (Phil Rowson), Hurford’s conspiratorial narrator, muse and latterday Puck.

Enter, in costume and in character, Tim (Andrew Dunn), headmaster of an ailing school, playing Mr Shandy; his wife Fran, Kindle-carrying head of a fabulous academy, playing Mrs Shandy; and Iain Armstrong’s Phil/Corporal Trim and Mick Jasper’s Andrew/Uncle Toby, who may or may not be gay partners. Missing is the club’s newest member, responsible for picking Shandy and playing the title role.

And so we have actors playing teachers playing characters, trying to stay in character but invariably reverting to their teacher selves, until the second half, when they really are the characters. Oh, hang on, no they are now actors playing actors playing the characters, ending up in the womb of the pregnant Susan or is it her character Susannah?

It isn’t funny, it’s too clever-clever, too convoluted, too contrived, much too long, and such a mouthful for the hard-working but struggling cast, in which Rowson fares best as scathing Greg and later as Sterne’s Footnote, a meddling black shadow unseen by everyone else on stage.

As the iShandy title indicates, this is a Shandy for the internet age, in which Hurford ponders our reading habits in the Kindle era and our vicarious use of computers for entertaining ourselves – at the expense of reading. One by one, the book club members admit they have not read Sterne’s tome. This is the one strand of a restless, breathless play that hits home with the sting of truth.

Hurford’s deconstruction of Sterne’s cock and bull story also provides a guided tour to the book, the cast dipping in and out of Wikipedia for background information; progressing through the pages; enacting both the notorious Black page and White page, and playing out increasingly surreal scenes.

Hurford strives for the bawdy, absurdist spirit of Sterne, allied to a running commentary on it, while Jane Linz Roberts’s set chimes with Hurford’s tone, but the play is bitty rather than witty.

Will it make you want to read the book? No. iShandy is not an iShambles, yet it is over-cluttered, and although artistic director Damian Cruden rarely has an off-day, this is his first flaccid flop since Up The Duff in 2009. iShandy is a cock and bull story with plenty of one and far too much of the other.

iShandy, York Theatre Royal, until May 11. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk