Playing farce is a
dangerous business. Not only is the timing and hitting of marks crucial, but physicality
is also a key element in the success of a piece. In a way, farce largely
depends upon an audience’s knowing of things that the characters do not. “We
know the vicar is behind the door, but the ingénue does not. We know why she’s
in her underwear and the husband’s trousers have fallen down but his affronted
wife does not,” writes Jonathan Biggins in the play’s program. Enter then, Noises
Off, Michael Frayn’s seminal farce – nay, play – about a “third-rate
production of a creaky bedroom farce” called ‘Nothing On’ as played by a less than fourth-rate troupe of actors.
I say play because the plotting and precision of the writing is pure Stoppard,
the collision of art-imitating-life is Pirandello’s, the characters’ awareness
of a curtain that will never fall is Beckett’s. Yet for all its double entendres
and mishaps, there lies at its heart the very real dilemma of not knowing your
next line, your next entrance, your next move, and in that way it is very much
like life – we never really know what (or, perhaps, who) is coming through the
door next.
Staged in three
acts, Act One depicts the final rehearsal before opening night (the first time
they have ever run the show through head to tail in one go). Act Two is the
production seen from backstage, four weeks into a national (regional?) tour
(and played mostly in actions, “looks and gestures”), while Act Three is the
production on its final night in Stockton-on-Tees, the last leg of the tour,
and indeed on its last legs. It’s all a bit Groundhog Day
in a way, the way we see the same one-act’s action played over and again, but
with increasing variation and divergence from the prompt-book.
Set in an gorgeous
old English country house – all wooden beams and plaster walls, far too many
doors (and those all set on rakish angles), and with too many plates of
sardines going in out off and on to be able to keep track of them – it is an
impeccable production, its smoothness and polished delivery only serving to
highlight just how fiendishly difficult farce is to play ‘straight’ as it were,
without indulging in or playing for laughs. A play – a production – like this
is like a giant clockwork mechanism, in which every move, entrance, exit, and
beat is choreographed within an inch of its life, yet that’s even before you
start to make it look like a rehearsal or seen from backstage, or on its last
legs. Farce, for all its enjoyment and entendres, really is more akin to a
scientific procedure than ‘just’ comedy. In many ways, the set (designed by
Mark Thompson) is a character in itself – its doors and wings disguising its
complexity and nature – and when seen from ‘backstage’ in Act Two, only then do
we begin to realise how extraordinary a feat of stagecraft it actually is.
Likewise with Julie Lynch’s costumes and the exquisite hairpieces the various cast
members wear; the attention to detail and flair for character and expression of
character – both the actor’s character, and the character they are playing in Nothing On – is so utterly delightful
and spot-on that all you can do is sit agog at Marcus Graham’s entrance as Nothing On’s director, and the way in which
everything sits so perfectly within the whole.
Another ensemble
show, it is foolish to single any one actor out, but mention must be made of
Marcus Graham’s flared purple trousers and mane of hair; Josh McConville’s
impeccable timing and extraordinary physicality; Ash Ricardo who spends
ninety-fiver percent of the play in her underwear; Lindsay Farris as the
exhausted and beleagured Stage Manager, Danielle King as the long suffering ASM
caught in one of the play’s two love triangles; Alan Dukes who spends most of
the first act with his trousers around his ankles; Genevieve Lemon whose Dotty
Otley switches accents at the drop of a hat, and who thribbles around her
business, making lines up as she goes along, with all the ease and grace of a
seasoned performer; Ron Haddrick as the company’s largely-deaf elder statesman,
more often than not lost somewhere in the theatre; Tracey Mann’s Belinda who
tries her best to keep the warring factions of Nothing On’s cast away from each other’s throats… And to Jonathan
Biggins, this productions’s director who, with all his experience and
brilliance with the annual Wharf Revues, makes the perfect director for such a
play, and joins the ranks of directors like Richard Cottrell and their
exquisite staged farces Ying Tong: A Walk
with The Goons, Travesties, and Loot (all for STC).
Recalling the gloriously
entendre-filled Carry On films, and
elements of Louis Nowra’s immortal Cosí,
Noises Off never stands still and refuses
to let anything get in the way of the show. As the old adage goes, ‘the show
must go on,’ and indeed it does, with infinite variation and increasing mirth,
until the point at the end when you wonder if anything else could go wrong. As
the world ends, perhaps all you can do is watch someone else slip on a banana
skin and be thankful that it isn’t you.
Theatre playlist: 10. Spanish Flea, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana
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