AT the restored home of The Good Old Days, the Leeds double act of Red Ladder theatre company and agit-prop folkies Chumbawamba take you back to the bad old days of 1910.

Days when trumped-up public schoolboys ran the country, corruption and sleaze polluted the corridors of power and the gulf between rich and poor was expanding like a fat cat’s girth. Ring any bells?

Yes, very loudly because Big Society! is a a riotous music-hall comedy – aptly premièred in Britain’s best-known music hall – that satirises the bad new days of Cameron and Osborne in Boff Whalley’s “journey into the comically vulgar underbelly of Edwardian Britain” as a cardboard cut-out of Edward VII looks on.

Written in response to government cuts (Red Ladder has lost 40 per cent of its funding), Whalley recalls the anarchic spirit of the 7:84 theatre company and Dario Fo as he presents two sides of a 1910 music hall show.

Front-cloth, there are the subversive Chumbawamba/Whalley songs that take a dig at Con-Dem Britain, together with music-hall speciality acts, whose routines are increasingly affected by what’s going on in the dressing room, where the company is buckling at the hands of the exploitative owner.

All is not sweetness and light between the Master of Cermonies (Dean Nolan) and the show’s musical comedian, George Lightfeather (Phill Jupitus).

Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus Of Disapproval have made merry with off-stage shenanigans, and in truth did it with a sharper razor.

Rod Dixon’s cast has plenty of fun, and his boisterous production has bags of energy in its comic sketches and septpieces, plus moments of lovelorn comic pathos from Jupitus, but it lacks narrative thrust and falls short of the plays and writers it apes.

Even the puppetry scene where Jupitus’s Lightfeather plays ventriloquist Cameron to Harry Hamer’s dummy Clegg mirrors Spitting Image’s bygone mockery of David Owen and David Steel.

Big Society! is too desperate for you to love it and crams in too much, diminishing the impact of its best strands, such as its revenge on the newspaper industry in the fate of the Man from The Double Standard.

For all its warmth and raucous good cheer, its sense of chaos needs a stronger focus, fewer scenes and more savage punchlines to match the songs’ tub-thumping clout.