Noises Off

When I asked my theatre teacher about “Noises Off,” by Michael Frayn, he told me that it was essentially a “perfect play." I think he was right. Here’s why.

Noises Off is a farce. If you’re not entirely sure what a farce is, watch this short trailer for the show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2fO6dzwZB0

So, yeah. A lot of slapstick, a lot of low-brow humor. If you ask Google to define it for you, it’ll tell you that a farce is “a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations.” While not always especially sophisticated, farces can be very, very funny. The really cool thing about this farce, though, is that it’s a farce within a farce. The play is about a group of people rehearsing and performing a play called Night On. Act One shows their final dress rehearsal. They are not ready to open. In Act Two*, we see a performance--from backstage. The entire set is turned around. And Act Three (for which the set is turned back around) is the production’s disastrous closing night.

This set-up gives Michael Frayn a huge number of comic levels to play off of. For one, there’s the play they’re performing. It involves lots of mistaken identities, people running (or stumbling) around in their underwear, and several plates of sardines, whose disappearances and reappearances baffle the characters.

Add to that the situation the actors are in. There’s a lot of humor in the desperation of these poor people on the night before they open a show that they've only had two weeks to rehearse. One actor is drunk and also keeps wandering off, so that everyone has to go looking for him; one actress gets very distracted and keeps losing her contact lenses; the poor stage manager is repeatedly blamed for things that aren’t her fault; the director is getting fed up with everyone else because they keep having to stop; and so on and so forth,

Then you get to Act Two, which opens with the introduction of a few love triangles. Then the play starts, and no one backstage can make any sound. As things start (unsurprisingly) going wrong onstage, people backstage resort to some bizarre measures to try and fix them; actors coming on and off stage only get glimpses of what’s going on, and draw mistaken conclusions about what they see. Since no one can talk, no one can explain what’s actually going on, which leads to the perception of romantic relationships where there are none, and creates some very complex relationship dynamics. Jealous actors start seeking revenge on each other, creating intense conflicts backstage, some of which involve an axe.

And finally, in the last act, all hell breaks loose. After these people, who can no longer stand each other, have been working together for months on end, they’re barely holding it together. Even before the curtain goes up, it starts falling apart. Everything goes wrong, and while some actors try ardently to soldier through, others simply give up. The play tailspins before cataclysmically (and hilariously) crashing and burning, with disaster after disaster nonstop until the lights go down.

The reason that this play works so well is Frayn’s use of perspective. In the first act, we get a peek into the world of the actor, director, stage managers and technicians, and get to see what’s going on with them as well as what’s going on in the play they are trying to perform. In the second Act, we again get a glimpse into the secret world of the actor, but in a different context. In a literal sense, we see everything in reverse. Unlike the presumably confused fictional audience watching Night On, the real audience of Noises Off is aware of what’s going on onstage (the Night On stage, that is) and what’s going on backstage. We know why things are going wrong onstage and why the various people backstage are at each other's throats. We're the only ones who can see the full picture--it’s excellent dramatic irony. It works especially well because, having already seen what they’re trying to do, the audience isn’t distracted by the plot of the play-within-a-play and can focus on and understand what's happening to the struggling actors. In Act Three, as we watch the show fall apart, we see the play from the same perspective as the fictional audience, but with a wealth of background information about what’s going on. In a lot of ways, Act Three would be funny standing on it’s own; but it’s made much, much funnier by our knowledge of the relationships between the actors and what’s gone down between them.

That’s why it’s a “perfect play”--it’s constructed flawlessly. Each act build off the last, and the play gets funnier and funnier as it progresses until everything comes together perfectly at the end. It’s written cleanly and brilliantly. Time isn't wasted setting up jokes, because the jokes set each other up, often in ingenious ways. It’s not too complicated for the audience to follow it, but it’s complex enough to make them forget things momentarily and to keep them from predicting everything that’s going to happen, so the element of surprise is preserved. It’s visually stimulating (constant movement, lots of doors), extremely clever, plays off the longstanding British tradition of the farce, and is, above all, really fun.

I'd highly recommend going to see it. There are also lots of versions of it on youtube, but none of them can really compare to what it would be like live onstage. Reading it is cool, but definitely a challenge--without the help of visuals, it takes a lot of focus to keep track of everything that's going on, especially in Act Two. If you don't feel up for that, I'd recommend reading There Shall Be No Bottom: A Bad Play For Worse Actors, a short play by Mark O’Donnell. It’s similar to Act Three of Noises Off, but is much easier to follow, and takes probably about five minutes to read. It's no where near as good, but it will give you a feel for what Noises Off is like.

I hope this was interesting--thanks for reading.

--CMcC

*In the Script, Act Two and Act Three are also called “Act One,” because each act shows Act One of Night On, but for clarity’s sake I’m just going to call them acts Two and Three.