Nothing demonstrates the inanity of profanity like an undercooked comedy. The famous Spitting Image puppets have returned in a political musical that’s more cuddly than cutting. Writers Matt Forde and Al Murray add a lot of swearing to their punchlines without understanding why. The temptation to use the F-bomb is a warning sign from the writer’s internal editor: ‘Delete and try again.’ To enliven bad writing with curse words is to mistake the symptom for the cure.

And the show chooses feeble or irrelevant targets. Rishi Sunak appears as a soppy head prefect who plots with Boris to depose King Charles and take over the monarchy. Their scheme is opposed by a team of commandos including Tom Cruise, RuPaul and Angela Rayner who try to defend the king and restore Britain’s moral fibre. Not a great plot but it’ll do. The show approaches certain subjects with extreme caution. Rayner’s trademark insult, ‘scum’, is omitted and no mention is made of the ‘ginger growler’. Her boss, Keir Starmer, appears several times as a magical saviour in a cape. Hardly satire, more like propaganda.

On the plus side, the show benefits from excellent visuals, decent video work and inventive costumes. The puppetry is first-class, of course. The writers’ best idea is to seat Meghan and Harry in the royal box which they use as a platform to plug Harry’s book. Each time he mentions Spare, the price has fallen. Decent gag.

Act Two abandons satire altogether and turns into a naked pamphleteering exercise. The writers assume that the entire crowd hates Brexit and longs to see its prejudices confirmed. Suella Braverman is depicted as a sex-crazed midget who dances on a gravestone inscribed ‘RIP British humanity’. This must refer to Braverman’s attempt to tighten our borders and to deny money to trans-European gangs of people traffickers and slave traders. But according to the writers, those criminals represent ‘humanity’.

There’s a lengthy sketch set in Dover where a Heil Hitler-ing Nigel Farage tries to prevent Stormzy, Jürgen Klopp and Tyson Fury from entering Britain. The scene features the line ‘Stormzy stormed it at Glastonbury.’ Come on, guys. That wouldn’t make p46 of Private Eye. Farage calls Tyson Fury a ‘pikey’ and Fury promptly beats him to death. Enter Hitler to reclaim Farage’s corpse for burial ‘in Germany’. But Farage doesn’t come from Germany. Nor did Hitler. The writers were obviously in a hurry to finish the script and press ‘send’. And they rely too heavily on outdated ideas such as the rumour that Tom Cruise is gay.

At the end, Maggie rises from the dead in the black cloak of a sorceress. Well, well. Mrs Thatcher is a witch. How did they dream that up? The show went down well enough with the audience. And the shadow cabinet are bound to approve of a script that looks like a lengthy application for a job in Starmer’s press office.

Stumped, by Shomit Dutta, is based on an inspired idea. Samuel Beckett played first-class cricket and he shared his love of the game with Harold Pinter. Dutta imagines the two playwrights padding up for a village game in the Cotswolds in 1964. And, by some miracle, he manages to inhabit his subjects’ minds to bring their personalities to life.

Pinter is struggling to get his pads on because he suffers from a swollen ankle. Beckett immediately quips: ‘Oedipus!’ (which means ‘swollen foot’). Pinter recalls playing Creon in a production of the play that toured Ireland in the 1940s. ‘Oedipus was 56,’ he says without further comment. He changes the subject and asks Beckett for his thoughts on nominative determinism. ‘Given my surname,’ comes the reply, ‘I avoid cathedrals.’

Beckett’s official role is to record the scores and he needs to discover the full name of a player known only as Doggo (a mangled echo of Godot). Audiences will enjoy the play better if they understand the laws of cricket and, in particular, the conventions observed by a batsman on strike who must order his partner to run, wait, or stay. The gravest sin in the game is to run your partner out by making the wrong call. This is exactly what Pinter does while sharing the crease with an elderly batsman who regularly opened for England in the 1930s. Only cricket-lovers will understand the exquisite shame of that blunder.

After the match, the dramatists get drunk in the pavilion and the show becomes surreal. Beckett exits stage left and reappears stage right in an echo of The Dumb Waiter’s closing scene. Pinter, confused by Beckett’s disappearance, calls out: ‘Who’s there?’ – the first line of Hamlet. Literary trainspotters will have fun picking out the references. Stephen Tompkinson, in a wonderfully accurate costume, captures something of Beckett’s essence. The lugubrious merriment, the down-at-heel eloquence, and the wit that flashes from nowhere like lightning on a rainy summer’s day. Terrific entertainment.