Revival of 'funniest farce ever' Noises Off proves a hit at Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre
When playwright Michael Frayn was told his award-winning farce Noises Off was going to be staged in the round, he had two words of advice for director Paul Robinson. They were: “Good luck.”
Robinson, also the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, went ahead anyway.
Noises Off is not only a farce – a performer running in and out of doors with their trousers round their ankles and another performer in bra and knickers dashing up and down stairs, both trying not to get caught in an infidelity – it is a frenetic, multi-faceted farce.
It is a play called Nothing On with in a play, Noises Off. The double meaning being the scantily-clad cast come close to bringing the curtain down on a no-show.
To complicate matters further, the ‘play within’ is being presented by a company of dysfunctional people and Frayn’s farce is also a pastiche of the genre.
Called “the funniest farce ever written”, Noises Off requires the sleight of hand of a magician – while your eyes are on the pigeon, the conjuror is concentrating on the rabbit.
In the round the actors’ every move is in the open and neither can the director order the curtain down to hide a set switcheroo.
Robinson and his cast pull it off!
The ensemble is Valerie Antwi, Adam Astill, Andy Cryer, Christopher Godwin, Annie Kirkman, Alex Phelps, Charlie Ryan, Susan Twist and Olivia Woolhouse. There is no weakest link, all are superb.
They wear split-second comic timing, falling down like Jenga bricjs and racing round like Lewis Hamilton at a Grand Prix so lightly, the audience fails to notice how much hard work must have gone into getting a play that goes wrong so right.
Noises Off is told in three acts – stick around for the set change because it is ingenious.
A theatre critic once told me that if I was reduced to writing about the set, then the play is awful. There is an exception to every rule. The chandelier in Phantom of the Opera is not it. This is.
Credit where it is due to the set designing and building teams.
The play follows the on and off-stage antics of a touring theatre company as it stumbles its way through the fictional farce, Nothing On.
Across the three acts, the audience witnesses the shambolic final rehearsals, a disastrous matinee seen from backstage and the catastrophic final performance – where the misunderstandings, jealousies, backstage drama and fall-outs from love affairs spill on to the stage.
In Noises Off, Frayn – and Robinson in his willingness to revive the 1982 classic – shows his delight in the Whitehall farces of Brian Rix, No Sex We’re British and Whitehall farce actor Ray Cooney, whose canon includes Run for Your Wife.
They both also revel in lampooning plays and those who put them on – the director with the roving eye, the talentless ingenue, the starry-eyed stage manager, the washed-up once leading man and the aging diva.
The in-the-round production of Noises Off is performed at a pace that leaves the audience breathless with laughter at a cast that has lost the plot. Subtle it is not but there are more tender, nuanced moments, glimpsed through the cleverly choreographed chaos.
Noises Off runs at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, from now until Saturday September 6. Tickets: on 01723 370541 and at www.sjt.uk.com
Sue Wilkinson