IF the over-loaded Last Train To Scarborough ran close to derailment last month, Chris Monks now surpasses himself with his second convoluted adaptation of the summer, but with ultimately more enjoyable results.

He is back on familiar ground here, re-working a Sir Arthur Sullivan comic opera as he did most memorably with his cricket take on The Mikado, a sporting success he is yet to match.

Cox & Box was a pre-Gilbert work by Sullivan and F.C.Burnand, who sounds more like a Swiss football team. Monks has re-imagined the one-act original with an extra topping of surrealism, then invented a new second act after adding gender-switching casting to the first..

We encounter the bedpan-obsessed Mrs Bouncer, a landlady played by a man, Paul Ryan, as a pantomime dame. In her lodging house, she is pulling a fast one on two men, played by women of course, who unknowingly share one room. Apprentice hatter James John Cox (Lara Stubbs) works by day; printer John James Box (Charlotte Harwood) works by night. Double the rent will lead to double the trouble as Cox and Box, preening cocks the pair of them – with accents more associated with posh boys Jack and Algy in The Importance Of Being Earnest – threaten a boxing match when their paths finally cross in a squabble over bacon and steak and more besides.

Cox & Box is played as briskly whisked Victorian farce but is saucy rather than sassy, becoming a little silly and over-stretched as the cast grows ever more frenetic. If watching these shallow young men behaving dimly in 1866 leaves you craving more bite, the satirical sequel will supply it as Mrs Bouncer's legacy is revealed.

Writer-lyricist Monks and arranger, composer and musical director Richard Atkinson turn the conceit of the first act on its head in the new Boks & Cocks, set in the same lodging room in the uncomfortably near future of 2016.

The new UZIP-fronted Coalition government has repatriated all migrant workers, whereupon identical Polish twin sisters Krystyna (Harwood) and Urszula (Stubbs) are pulling a fast one on UZIP-supporting landlord Bob Narks by secretly sharing a room. One can pass herself off as a Yorkshire lass from Rotherham, but the other is far slower on teaching thissen (CORRECT) Yorkshire. One is keeping chickens in a cupboard (maybe the Cocks of the title, if a male is among them!); the other is trying to make her way as a boxer, dreaming of knocking out Barnsley girls.

Monks and Atkinson are in fine form sending up UKIP, xenophobia, supermarkets and Yorkshire stereotypes; Ryan is amusingly grotesque in an echo of Leonard Rossiter's landlord Rigsby, while Harwood and Stubbs have a riot with their Polish accents. There is even a topical reference to the Tour de France in an affectionate but irreverent new Yorkshire national anthem that deserves life beyond this show: the real Mrs Bouncer's legacy.

Cox & Box - Mrs Bouncer's Legacy, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, on various dates until August 30. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com