Extermination would be a fit fate for Smelling a Rat, a wheel-spinning 1988 exercise in " anti-farce " by the British filmmaker and playwright Mike Leigh. Bandied about, in its New England premiere by Nora Theatre Company, as a statement about social class and family relations in Thatcher’s England, the play is a belabored comedy set in a rich exterminator’s bedroom where a colony of pink closets beckon and everyone who enters has a nasty-animal name.

Rex Weasel is the resident of what is, at the Nora, a tasteless if insufficiently opulent boudoir. He has just returned early and without his wife from a Christmas golfing holiday. When he’s surprised by loquacious employee Vince Maggot and Vince’s wife, Charmaine, who have come by to make sure things are running smoothly and to have a furtive look at the boss’s digs, Rex takes refuge in his wardrobe. When Rex’s leather-clad mute of a son, Rock, turns up with his girlfriend, Melanie-Jane Beetles, the Maggots also take to the closets. When all come bursting out, the golf-clad Rex brandishing a gun, a traumatized Melanie-Jane hides in the bathroom. What qualifies these deliberately banal and protracted antics as anti-farce must be that they are so doggedly unfunny. As for the play’s broader social implications, will someone please get the metaphoric Raid?

Leigh, of course, is the writer/director of some excellent films, including the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies and Topsy-Turvy, as well as the author of 22 plays. He is known for the improvisatory, collaborative way in which he works in both film and theater. Indeed, Smelling a Rat (which was recently produced Off Broadway) smacks of having been improvised rather than calibrated in the manner of Feydeau or Joe Orton or Michael Frayn. It is doubtless meant to be significant that Rex Weasel has made the money to furnish his posh pad by exploiting society’s aversion to actual vermin, which is not on a par with its aversion to their moral equivalent. Besides, as the ditheringly philosophical Vince Maggot points out in a paean to arachnids ( " ain’t no flies on spiders " ), not all perceived pests are to be deplored. On the other hand, Vince, whom any utterance will launch into an " inasmuch as " –strewn ramble, has nothing good to say about Rex, whom he characterizes as a " fork-tongued chameleon " if not an out-and-out crook. (The chatty Maggots themselves may represent the easily awed, too-accommodating nature of the working class.) Then there is the issue of Rex’s sullen son, who appears to have been raised on insecticides rather than on TLC — no surprise he’s interested in sex but not communication.

Apart from pratfalling symbols of late-20th-century corruption and dysfunction, what has Smelling a Rat to offer? Not one but several instances of voluble off-stage " tinkling " in what malapropic Vince calls the " on suet " bathroom. And, oh yes, we get to watch Rex unpack. There’s some pinch-and-tickle between the Maggots and some hotter and heavier clinches for stony Rock and his burbling Beetle (one of whose actual lines is " Don’t be a silly sausage " ). Perhaps the prolonged pointlessness is the point, in some Beyond the Fringe sort of way. But as Vince cheerily if inanely remarks at one point when things don’t seem to be going anywhere, " This ain’t going to get the pig a new bonnet, is it? "

Director Daniel Gidron keeps his five characters and eight doors prattling and slamming (though, on opening afternoon, one pesky portal gaped for a while when it was supposed to be shut, prompting an ad lib that was no dumber than the rest of what was going on). Eric Levenson’s cartoon set boasts some droll touches, among them the spaniel portraits glimpsed in the hall. And Paul Kerry and Stephanie Dorian are amusing as the annoying but warm-hearted Maggots, he a logorrheic doofus, she the possessor of a spontaneous rat-a-tat laugh that she exercises far more often than anyone in the audience seems inclined to.