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.
