IF THOSE post-election blues are still getting you down, then a good dose of laughter may just be what you need to kick-start the spirit for the fightback.

With this production of Arnold Ridley’s The Ghost Train, Manchester’s Royal Exchange is as good a dispensary as any for such medicine.

It gets the full treatment — zany comedy, slapstick, great acting and total mayhem.

Ridley — probably best known as Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army — wrote the play in 1923 after being stranded in a railway station overnight and his plot, following the misfortunes of a group of madcap misfits stranded at a small railway station in the heart of Cornwall, is straightforward.

The prospect of being stuck overnight in the gloomy backwater is compounded by the sinister stationmaster recounting the tale of the haunted train that has been known to whistle through the station. In structure the play is classic early 20th-century farce but in the hands of director Paul Hunter and his very talented Told By An Idiot company there is a renewed freshness to the work.

The clever opening has an “orchestra” generate a cacophony of sound from dustbin lids, grass rollers and other weird implements which builds to the sound of a steam engine in full flight and Laura Hopkins’s clever set design provides a wonderful visual spectacle.

To a modern audience Ghost Train is more comedy than thriller and, while it has no great literary merit, for sheer fun it is a great antidote to the grim reality of Tory Britain.

Runs until June 20, box office: royalexchange.co.uk