Is there anything that you can't make a joke out of, however terrible? Rape? Auschwitz? September 11? Oh come on, we've all heard them. And this is a good time to revive Trevor Griffiths's astonishing 1975 play about the possibilities of comedy as a force for both reaction and revolution. Comedians is set during an evening class for a group of working-class would-be comedians run by Eddie Walters, an old music-hall comic who stopped telling jokes after visiting the ruins of postwar Germany. The play pre-dates the rise of what we now call alternative and stand-up comedy by more than half a decade.
Comedians now seems as much an elegy for the failure of that movement as a call for comedy to liberate the will and change the situation. The comics in Walters's class, desperate to escape their tedious jobs, tell a string of racist, sexist jokes with an eye to getting on an agent's books. Most comics in the 1980s sold out as soon as a TV contract was waved in front of them. Have I Got News For You is not going to change the world.
The form of Griffiths's play is as fascinating as its content. It implicates the audience - most notably in the second act, when the lads perform their sets in front of an agent, in a social club where the audience would much rather be playing bingo than listening to fledgling comics. The real audience becomes the imaginary one, listening to jokes that are anti-Irish, blacks, women and Jews. Each joke is a little pellet, a final solution. And yes, we laughed at some of them.
The production is directed with the meticulous attention to detail that we have come to expect from Sean Holmes, who is making a speciality of rediscovering plays that are not old enough to be considered classics or recent enough to be considered new writing. Because of their distance, however, they sometimes tell us more about the world in which we live, and where we came from, than the very latest at the Royal Court.
This is not a comfortable evening in the theatre. To be frank, there are not many laughs. But the brilliance of this play is undimmed, and there is a dazzling performance from David Tennant as Gethin Price, the young comic brimming with class hatred who uses comedy as an act of terrorism.
· At Oxford Playhouse (01865 798600) until Saturday, then tours. Further information: 01865 723238.