The Inn at Lydda at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

I was well into my twenties when I first had a Caesar salad. I acquiesced in an attempt to not look like the odd ball who’d never has a Caesar salad before and found the who experience mildly distressing. Roll on a year and I was purchasing bags of the stuff by choice. The boringest of lettuce varieties coupled with sleek slices of Parmesan, lines of salty dressing and croutons suitable for a teething infant had come to make sense. The Inn at Lydda, based around a fictional meeting between Tiberius Caesar and Jesus Christ, is unfortunately nowhere near as successful at combining a motely bunch of elements into a coherent whole.

The programming choice of John Wolfson’s play seems intriguingly unfashionable. It lies at the opposite end of the spectrum to the poster image for Imogen of Maddy Hill half in Nike trackies half in ripped Elizabethan frills. OK, so the author happens to have made some significant donations to the Globe in the form of a First Folio and the like, but you imagine (hope, really hope) this was not entirely a transactional decision. The work was previously performed as a radio play on BBC R4, which adds some endorsement in its own right. It also had all the potential to be a fascinating choice of production. Now that large numbers of people identify as atheists – and at a time when many see the word ‘Christian’ and think ‘American evangelists’ – the idea of exploring loosely biblical narratives and the stories that permeate through centuries of literature and culture felt like it had genuine merit.

The main problem with The Inn at Lydda (and I know it’s not the Christian spirit to pick fault, but there are quite a few) is that it attempts to make an old fashioned – in format and subject matter – play accessible by adding humour. With its endless re-workings and re-fashionings of Shakespeare, the Globe knows a thing or two about taking something old and making it less fusty. Yet The Inn at Lydda does this in all the wrong ways, relying on chortle after chortle of lightly intellectual jokes (you start to see now why it may have suited its former incarnation as Radio 4 entertainment).

It’s hard to watch a production with an historical setting delivering puns and one-liners without immediately thinking: Blackadder. Or, Horrible Histories. Or, Monty Python. All of those listed are both considerably more funny than The Inn at Lydda and succeed because they are solidly meant to be comedy. Wolfson’s play provides Asterix-style Gluteus Maximus jokes followed quickly by Jesus Christ giving a short sermon on the corrupting nature of power and Rome. The latter moments, which should be both powerful and justify the staging of the play as having something to say to a modern audience, are hard to take seriously following an arse joke.

Thanks to the beauty of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse itself, and the aptness of the cumulus-covered and cherub-adorned ceiling guiding the Magi through their journey, there is a side to The Inn at Lydda that sails through fairly unobjectionably. Music designed by Louise Ann Duggan floats down from the upper stage area, sucking the listener into the Ancient Rome the late Victorians painted: women’s wrists ringed in bangles making languid gestures in the bathhouse heat; ringletted hair piled in Grecian influenced up-dos and the symbolic positioning of flowers telling part of the narrative.

It’s also performed by a strong cast who make the most of moving between beaver puppetry, clunky intertexuality of Macbeth’s ‘insane root’ and un-sexy references to sex. Stephen Boxer fills his depiction of the ailing Emperor Tiberius Caesar with nods to King Lear caught without his cagoule in the wilderness. There is the start of actual sorrow in his hallucinations of a once faithful dog long dead. Matthew Romain makes John the Apostle borderline feral – a visionary ranting to the skies above. In this character it is possible to get an inkling of something interesting in Wolfson’s writing. The playwright’s programme notes state that he wanted to explore the idea of John as the possible author of the Book of Revelation, a man who imagined multi-headed beasts rising from the waves. There’s the potential for much more here, to explore ideas of sanity and insanity, religious fervour and the loosening of the mind. Unfortunately as it is, John stays just the wrong side of being the biblical version of a twenty-something stoner with droopy clothes and manic eyes.

Samuel Collings tackles the perennially difficult task of playing Jesus. For the majority of the play he seems pretty pissed off. And wouldn’t we all if someone had just stuck large nails through our hands? And yet, I kind of thought that was the point of Christ – and forgive me speaking from the insubstantial position of a childhood of occasional Quaker meetings and visits to the pagan sites of Glastonbury – that he was above snide gestures and being the one to dole out the punishments. Collings is full of snark as he makes little in-jokes with John and watches Caesar destroy his own cure. The fundamental, over-riding, glorifying quality of Jesus Christ, COMPASSION, is here absent. And that’s far more puzzling than wondering why people go a bit power-crazy when given an empire to play with.

All these little bits – the comedy, the large cast of characters, the wafting music, the all-to-human saviour – end up limp and wilting. The decadence of Rome looks pedestrian (and uninviting to women according to the list of cast members) and Christ is going through a smug phase. I’m off to buy a salad.