Campy British farce ‘Run for Your Wife’ is good for a laugh.

British playwright Ray Cooney specializes in sex farces, a genre popular in the United Kingdom. Here they might look like outrageous sitcoms, but they’re often far better and, like all good farces, they’re frantic and funny. And the British love them.

Manhattan Pier Players’ production of Cooney’s “Run for Your Wife,” in its first Southern California production, is certainly funny, but it’s not quite as frantic as it could be under Jean Van De Griek’s direction. She could have her actors pick up their cues; that would help. When they get up to speed, they’re just fine, and they show Cooney’s slightly bent sense of humor to good advantage.

The plot is as simple as it can be. John Smith (Steven Ruggles) lives with his wife, Mary (Elise Ogden), in Wimbledon, in London. John is a cabdriver who works odd shifts. He has to, in order to make room for rushing to Streatham, a neighboring London borough. There, under the same name, he lives with Barbara (Melinda MacDonald), whom he married a few months after he married Mary. One night he’s involved in a confrontation that leaves him with a bump on his noggin and dizzy enough to give one address to the hospital and another to the police, both with the same name. And the mix-ups are off to a flying start.

The complications are too involved to go into. Besides, it would spoil the fun. Let it suffice that between Mary and John’s lonely neighbor, Stanley (Gary Page), and Barbara and John’s new gay neighbor, Bobby (Tom Overmyer), and the investigating officers from both boroughs, and the threesome themselves, John weaves so many fabrications that he can’t be blamed for not keeping them straight.

The fabrication that causes a pause, though, is the typical behind-the-hand chuckles at the expense of the stereotypical portrayal of the gay neighbor, hand on hip, flamboyant and flaming. Even John, when trying to convince one of the detectives that he and Stanley are lovers, puts his hand on his hip and minces awkwardly to prove he’s telling the truth.

Van De Griek might have made this less stereotypical. It would have been just as funny, and probably more so.

Otherwise her tone has a fine understanding of the genre, and most of the performances are funny and honest. Ruggles gives an exceptionally clever and funny performance as John, intricate and detailed, with some of the same beleaguered befuddlement of late British comedian Tony Hancock. Ogden and MacDonald are quite good as his spouses, with their distinct personas clearly defined and their honesty appealing.

Page is inclined to overplay as Stanley, but he would be effective if calmed down a bit, and Overmyer simply overdoes his campy Bobby. As the detectives, Steve Valentine and Alexander Wells are excellent, particularly Wells, whose calmness and dimness in the midst of all the madness are wonderful.

If the cues were picked up and the camp toned down, this “Run For Your Wife” would sparkle more than it does. It’s a lot of fun, and following Cooney’s labyrinthine logic is like riding a roller coaster.

What: Manhattan Pier Players’ production of British playwright Ray Cooney’s “Run for Your Wife.”

Where: City Hall Theatre, 1400 Highland Ave., Manhattan Beach.

When: Fridays-Saturdays, 8:30 p.m. Ends May 2.

Tickets: $8.75.

Information: (310) 545-5621, Ext. 321.