Noises Off: It’ll be alright on the night (and other farcical nonsense)

Don’t worry about following the plot of Noises Off, the 1982 Michael Frayn comedy that has just opened at Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town. What starts as a mildly unnerving last-minute technical rehearsal for a play that’s due to begin in just a few hours rapidly descends into complete and utter pandemonium. 

If it feels like the storyline is getting away from you, it’s because it’s getting away from everyone, including the harried cast of characters – actors, stagehands and one director nearing the end of his tether. 

While we’re ostensibly witnessing a behind-the-scenes meltdown of a frankly appalling sex comedy, in reality this farce is an opportunity for a masterful writer to reveal the mechanics of comedy’s complex calculus – and to demonstrate an inordinate number of ways in which the human funny bone can be triggered with just about zero cerebral engagement. 

And, as the horrors experienced by the characters on stage intensify, so too do the laughs out in the real-world auditorium.  

By the time the farce-within-a-farce’s long-suffering director, Lloyd Dallas (played with irresistible charm and a mounting sense of an eminent meltdown by Aidan Scott, one of two professional actors who add their mettle to what is ostensibly a student production) manages to drag his hapless actors through their final rehearsal, you might imagine that things can’t get any worse. 

But you’d be entirely wrong. Act I, which introduces us to the foibles of the various characters who’ve contracted themselves to a terribly written sex farce, is merely a prelude to a bewildering meta-theatrical account of just how off kilter things can go when the madness of real life imposes itself on the neatly ordered structure of a playwright’s vision. 

The play-inside-the-play is in fact so dire that you struggle to decide if Frayn was making a point about the dead-end careers of everyone who’s agreed to be in it, or was poking fun at the tastes of a certain kind of audience. The badly written play that’s being rehearsed features, among other bits of hammy stage business, bouts of near-nudity and trousers-round-the ankles visual jokes, lots of messy business involving plates of sardines, an inordinate number of doors being opened and closed according to some elaborate choreography, and not only a diabolical plot twist involving identity confusion, but some of the most piss-poor instances of coincidence ever conceived for an imaginary play.

Which is, of course, simply fantastic.

Because as much as we get to witness utter chaos unfolding in front of us, what sets this farce apart from reality is that everything that happens on stage – assuming the theatre gods are kind and everything runs to plan – has been meticulously plotted and obsessively planned, the intricate details of the script enabling the breathtakingly engineered symmetry of the comedy to produce something that really shouldn’t work, but absolutely does.

By the time the play comes to a close, no matter how well you know the plot, how many times you’ve watched the pandemonium unfold, you still reach a point where your anxiety levels are through the roof, sphincter clenched, nerves frayed. 

It’s rather thrilling, and as much as it leans wildly into slapstick and isn’t afraid to exaggerate its ridiculousness, it also relentlessly feels as though the last remaining vestiges of physical reality are at any moment about to come caving in. 

Director Chris Weare, who must have nerves of steel to have taken on such a dizzying project, has somehow managed to convince his cast to do precisely what this very difficult mode of comedy requires: to avoid hamming it up, and play the truth of their characters and live out every moment as though it were real, albeit somewhat surreal and slightly nightmarish.

It’s a harrowing genre to pull off. It’s screwball comedy that must go totally off the rails, exceed the bounds of even the most ridiculous slapstick. But all of it is conducted within a context that feels somehow perfectly reasonable: it’s the theatre, after all, where everything is make-believe – and scripted. 

Frayn’s thesis is ultimately about the nature of chaos. 

If it’s organised, we call it comedy. If it’s allowed to run wild, we call it life. In this play, the two forces – scripted comedy and unscripted life – collide. Which, of course, produces the farcical nonsense that unfolds like a descent into madness before our very eyes.

There is, for example, a moment in the third act when one of the actors enters what is meant to be an empty stage only to find that another actor is in fact there. 

Part of the comedy is in the way the actor nevertheless attempts to act his way out of what is a totally preposterous situation: Baffled by the incongruity of his predicament, and having already spoken half his entrance line, “We’ve got the place…”, he freezes, waits for the actor who shouldn’t be on stage to clear off, and then continues, “…entirely to ourselves!”

This ridiculousness only hints at the moment’s deeper comic genius, however. The real reward for the audience is witnessing the psychological torment experienced by an actor, who – it has been established – fastidiously requires a motivation for every breath his character takes. Never mind that he’s a gentle soul who gets nosebleeds at the mere mention of violence and yet must survive night after night of a production that increasingly feels like it’s taking place in a padded cell. 

Triangulating this range of vexed sensations, actor Robert Everson allows his face to calmly travel through a range of perplexing emotions, all the while never once winking at us, nor overplaying the comedy. Instead, he just lets the terror wash through him, producing deeply satisfying comedy.

The madness doesn’t happen only on stage, though, but also behind the scenes, backstage, offstage and – as we learn from the company’s know-it-all and gossip – in various bedrooms between rehearsals. 

What Frayn’s script deviously makes such a meal of is the degree to which the characters’ “real-world” relationships increasingly add dynamite to the already explosive farce they’re performing in. 

In other words (as Lloyd explains to his cast when he reaches an explosive level of frustration in Act I), farce and theatre are really just like life.

The difference, of course, is that theatre is scripted – and rehearsed. Exhaustingly so, in fact. 

And for Noises Off to work, every nuance, every bit of dubious dialogue, each dropped pair of trousers, every fumble, trip, bump and collision is painstakingly planned, plotted and choreographed to within an inch of the play’s life. 

Creating meaningful chaos, it turns out, requires utter control.

Amid this mayhem, it’s a genuine joy to observe the fresh, instinctive performances of the student actors. They each add something unvarnished and from-the-heart to the tightly controlled proceedings. There’s a verve they bring, a genuineness that comes from the very real delight taken in making the madcap characters they’re playing come alive. Unlike the hack actors they’re playing, this cast comes to the work with an energy that compels the audience to discover the play’s magic afresh. 

There’s a touching honesty – a genuine love of every moment – that makes this show come alive.

You see it, for example, in the wonderfully adroit performance by Ben Stannard. He plays a perfectly competent actor whose inability to complete a sentence or utter a fully formed idea unless it’s scripted is balanced against his off-stage impatience and mounting desire for vengeance against a fellow actor. Among his best moments are scenes in which he’s compelled to race through such a vast array of quick emotional shifts that it’s impossible to imagine how he is able to parse each new state of exasperation intelligibly. 

And yet he does. And he does so while achieving the remarkable feat of trying to put on a brave face for the imaginary audience witnessing a play in which absolutely everything is going horrifically wrong. 

Look out, too, for Stannard’s various gaits, distilled (unwittingly, I suspect) from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks; whether he’s not-quite-running or is traipsing surreptitiously across the stage, or waging war behind the scenes, you can’t help but notice how the actor’s mind and body are engaged in a farcical power struggle – and it’s beautiful to witness.

As is each performance, really, everyone their own marvellously enjoyable creation.

But don’t take my word for it. “These kids are bananas,” Aidan Scott says of the student actors who share the stage with him. 

“They are so incredibly good at what they do, and they are so incredibly precise, and so eager to just jump in head first. They’re not one foot out, one foot in, they are absolutely balls to the wall, and they absolutely keep me on my toes. These young actors are going to blow people’s socks off, because they blow my socks off.” DM

Noises Off is playing at Cape Town’s Theatre on the Bay until 14 September. There will be a short run at Montecasino in Johannesburg in October.