Slowly but surely, Mark Watson is making his mark felt in every corner of the Fringe – in fact, it’s getting hard to imagine a festival without him. No longer satisfied with his 24-hour comedy marathons, Watson has now taken over a hotel on George Street, with a gleefully silly piece of site-specific theatre. Watson’s hotel is essentially Fawlty Towers on meltdown and features a suicidal manager, a cluster of overworked and surly staff and pure unmitigated chaos. This isn’t a serious attempt at a site specific show – it feels more like a fairground ride than an authentic experience – but it is still bloody good fun and executed with wit, confidence and a nice eye for detail.

The audience is ushered into the hotel by a legion of bellhops, all encouraging us to make ‘full use of the facilities’, including a meditation room, cabaret and a decidedly shoddy restaurant. As is the case with most site-specific theatre, it is best to go on your own, drop your inhibitions and have a damn good snoop. The set pieces are slick fun, but the further you poke around and the bolder you get, the bigger the rewards. At one point, I opened a tiny storage cupboard to find two people squeezed inside, methodically folding down the ends of a huge batch of loo-roll.

The scripted sections, such as a suitably shambolic job interview, work less well, as the audience’s impatient excitement stop them from settling into more sustained sketches. It’s the improvised comedy and visual gags that work best - the nutter chefs hidden away in the skanky kitchen, creating mountains out of kitchen utensils and scampering around like apes, as well as the constant spats erupting between the harassed and unhappy staff.

Some of the rooms are also more cleverly conceived than others. Although the meditation space and cabaret are neat skits, they’re not in keeping with the general mania of this show. The best spot is the ‘Administration Room’, which feels a bit like Alice in Wonderland, but much greyer and even weirder. The room has absolutely nothing to do with a hotel, but it is inventively ridiculous and bizarre. Arms shoot out of holes in the wall, a ‘mental health’ officer serenades someone with a cantata and everyone seems to be walking around with only one shoe.

The novelty does wear off after a while and the lack of narrative drive means that, despite the manic energy of this vast company of actors, the show runs out of steam before the hour is up. In some ways, it is stuck slightly between two camps – the tiny details, the authentic signs and realistic costumes all push towards a loosely realistic show, yet most of the scenarios are unquestionably surreal. Next time it’d be good to see this smart, cheeky company commit to one type of experience, either recreating the hysteria of an exceptionally shoddily run hotel, or doing away with reality altogether and letting their imaginations run wild.

16.15, till Monday 31 August 2009