Have you ever had an angel on your shoulder? Mr Collioni, the Venetian owner of a London café, is so busy searching for angelic presences that he hardly notices his down-at-heel new waitress, Margaret, is shedding feathers everywhere. Could she possibly be his guardian angel?

This devised piece is inspired by short stories from Anna Maria Murphy, a poet who in the past has supplied some sharp verses for the Kneehigh theatre company. But what here might have been a beguiling piece of whimsy ends up as an earthbound muddle.

Collioni’s angel hunting and Margaret’s private poetic reveries (“Cappucino-frappacino-double-latte-expresso your feelings”) that suggest she’s had one coffee too many aren’t the half of it. We also encounter forbidden love, Catholic guilt — even a pregnant woman up a tree during a Venetian flood.

Collioni’s celestial fixation, we gradually learn in a confusingly diffuse fashion, stems from a wartime childhood experience: when he was abandoned by relatives in Italy, a cake-giving stranger guided him safely to London and inspired his career as a master baker. The origins of Collioni’s conception and birth also reveal the affair between a priest and a shy Catholic woman.

The expansive, exuberant tales of Louis de Bernières and Isabel Allende would have comfortably accommodated a story like this, which flits from religiosity to farce, from a London patisserie to a storm-tossed Venice. But Catherine Church and Richard Cuming’s touring production for the Winchester-based Platform 4 company needs a firmer directorial hand.

On a cluttered stage, the use of such items as an overturned table and a glass-fronted cake cabinet seems less about driving the narrative and more about achieving individual effects. Perhaps Collioni’s family history is being transmitted through his heavenly-host detectors — an old wireless set and a Heath Robinson jumble of wires. If so, they are obviously faulty because the picture remains fuzzy throughout.

When not reduced to a series of sketch-like caricatures, Colin Michael Carmichael and Sarah Thom impress in their central roles: he turns the eccentric café owner into a touchingly forlorn figure; she’s a memorable mixture of public dowdiness and seething private passion.

But, as so often with devised pieces, the collective ethos has led to woolly storytelling. If only a guardian angel had been on hand during rehearsals to show them the way.

IAN JOHNS