Unlike most members of the audience when I watched Keeping up Appearances (MellowDrama at the Manoel Theatre), I am far from keen on the performance of a vastly popular television series, for two reasons.

Firstly, it is very difficult to recreate in a stage play the effect of a series of shows that have grown on viewers over a longish period of time.

Secondly, it is even more difficult to find stage techniques that will replicate the comic effects of the television camera.

Much of the success of the television series was due not just to the marvellously comical creation by Patricia Routledge of the key character, Hyacinth Bucket, but also to the way in which the camera emphasised her ludicrous mannerisms.

Routledge’s Hyacinth is a monster of gentility and snobbishness, her tiniest facial twitch and her every bodily gesture expressing her feelings of social superiority filling the screen.

Marylu Coppini, the production’s Hyacinth, is given star treatment by making her first entrance through the auditorium, allowing her to get a hearty welcoming applause.

Later on we are allowed to see the trait Hyacinth is most famous for: that of being in mortal fear of having people she socially admires detect her doing something undignified.

She does very well for herself in the first act, and less so in the second, where author Roy Clarke tries too hard to make the audience laugh, with the result that the audience laughs much less.

Coppini is an experienced and resourceful comic actress and always takes command of the stage when she is on it, but the script, while containing quite a few good laugh lines, generally gets by just because of the silent references to television episodes the audience has seen.

It is a script that needs the overpowering presence that only the television camera can give a Hyacinth who is a bit larger than human.

Clarke wisely has given this farcical comedy a setting not used in the television series.

Emmet (Jean-Pierre Agius), Hyacinth’s next door neighbour whom Hyacinth likes but who lives in mortal fear of her personality and company, is directing an amateur production of a whodunit set in the 1920s – or is it 1930s? – helped by his sister Elizabeth (Louiselle Vassallo).

His cast will include Hyacinth’s sisters Daisy (Vanessa Attard) and Rose (Isabel Warrington), and even Daisy’s husband Onslow (James Calvert).

It will also include a character absent from the television series, Edward Milton, known as ‘Milly’ (Marc Cabourdin), recently divorced and suffering from bad nerves, but rather personable. In fact, when he meets the mini-skirted and man-eating Rose, the inevitable happens and the production gets a small dose of comical sex.

Trouble hits the production when Hyacinth hears that one of the characters is a titled lady, and badgers Emmet into giving her the part. Later, however, she begins to have some doubt when she realises that her character is murdered at the end of act one.

Naturally she remonstrates with Emmet that Lady Whatsit should not die, and when Emmet tells her she is killed in mistake for someone else, Hyacinth comes up with one of the play’s best lines, “So why shouldn’t someone else be killed instead?”

In the second act, Hyacinth finds herself playing a second role in the production, that of a cook. This leads her into embarrassing situations when a well-bred woman by whom Hyacinth wants to be highly regarded (Jo Caruana) – I’m not sure if it is the Vicar’s wife, but who cares? – sees her apparently simulating sex with a large male puppet, after which she engages her in talk , with Hyacinth answering her in dialect, a not very Hyacinth-like ploy, I thought.

More trouble occurs when Hyacinth’s senile father (Martin Azzopardi) comes on wearing a subacqua mask and brandishing a harpoon, and this leads to not terribly funny scurrying round the stage.

Rose and Milly rush off into the wings presumably to have some torrid sex, and all the rest, Hyacinth included, seem ready to live contentedly, if not quite happily, ever after.

Steve Casaletto’s direction is spot-on in the first act, but he has not succeeded equally well with the very contrived second act.

Calvert and Attard manage to make Onslow and Daisy comical without trying too hard to produce copies of the television performers, and Warrington is a hilarious Rose.

Agius’s fear of Hyacinth comes out well, while Vassallo tries less successfully to put colour into the colourless part of Elizabeth.

Cabourdin begins very disappointingly with an overdone portrayal of a nervous Milly, but allows Rose to coax him into playing much better later on. I fear Caruana as the well-bred lady never comes to life.

In my review of Xbihat in last week’s The Sunday Times, I carelessly referred to Godwin Scerri, in the part of Michele, as Godwin Micallef. I had previously referred to him by his right name, but I still feel I have to apologise to my old friend Godwin and to this paper’s readers.