Forget Copenhagen. Come to that, you can forget Hamlet and King Lear as well. Noises Off is not just Michael Frayn's masterpiece but possibly the best play ever written. It is the Mount Everest of farce, so splendid that once you have climbed it there is nowhere else to go. After running for years in the 1980s, it had a second revival in the 1990s at the National Theatre, which also had a long life in the West End and on tour. Now it's been given another whirl at the Old Vic, directed by Linday Posner, and it proves to be as funny as ever.
With Celia Imrie as the immortal sardine-carrier Mrs Clackett (a much better part than Cleopatra, in my view), it's tempting to say nothing could possibly go wrong with this production. After all, the text has been endlessly polished and rewritten by Frayn and the director of the NT production Jeremy Sams. But that would be to forget just how difficult it is to take the lines and the stage directions and reassemble them into a three-dimensional sequence of actions that has the audience rolling in the aisles. The laugh lines in this show are unpredictable; I was the prompter for a highly memorable amateur production of this play a few years ago, and I can testify to the fact that audiences vary enormously in their reactions; they all laugh, but at entirely different moments. Given that unpredictability, and the fact that the Old Vic show was still in previews when I saw it, I think it may still have a little way to travel until the cast adjust their timing to secure maximum comic effect. But it's still VERY good. Michael Frayn's stroke of genius is to move the characters out of the traditional domestic setting where wives and husbands plot against each other, and into the theatre, where actors plot to deceive the audience that what they are doing is real in a nightly battle not just with slippery sardines and doors that fail to open and close, but also with each other.
While Celia Imrie as the old theatrical trouper Dotty, Janie Dee is terrific as bossy Belinda, the backstage head girl who keeps the fictional cast of Frayn's dodgy play-within-a-play ploughing ahead from Weston-super-Mare onwards. Robert Glenister as Lloyd the director, Jamie Glover as Garry, Jonathan Coy as the hapless Freddie and Karl Johnson as the veteran thespian Selsdon all know exactly how to extract maximum comedy while acting with a straight face. Amy Nuttall as the sexy-but-dim Brooke and Aisling Loftus as the hapless ASM Poppy don't quite bring the same level of comic flair to their parts -- at least not yet. The key to making Brooke funny is to imitate what Mark Rylance did in Boeing-Boeing -- always be half a second behind the rest of the cast.
After Act Two, in which the backstage mayhem seems to reach a climax, it can be difficult to maintain the comedy in Act Three, when the production of the play-within-a-play finally collapses in chaos. But there's no anticlimax in this production. Everyone should go and see this play, not just for a good night out but because farce is a great theatrical genre that often seems to be on life support. Who has the writing skills to follow Frayn in this great tradition? Richard Bean's clever makeover of Goldoni's comedy into the NT's current hit One Man, Two Guvnors shows that the art of sending audiences into paroxysms of laughter isn't quite dead. Some may find Bean's play funnier; but if I was forced to take one of these two plays to a desert island, I think I would choose the Frayn.
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