"Noises Off' at People's Light (2nd review)

Michael Frayn's Noises Off is a comedy about a provincial British theater company presenting a fictitious play called Nothing On. The cast of has-beens and never-wills is hopelessly unready, baffled by entrances and exits, missed lines, and troublesome props (such as plates of sardines). The title Noises Off is, of course, a stage direction for sounds coming from offstage.

The playwright extends his humor to faux house calls that tell the audience that the performance is about to start. And he has written mock blurbs for Nothing On that inform us, for example, that the author of Nothing On is a former ''unsuccessful gents hosiery wholesaler'' whose previous farce ran for nine years on London's West End, and the director's credits include a "highly successful season for the National Theatre of Sri Lanka."

When Noises Off opened on Broadway in 1983, Frank Rich in the New York Times called it "the funniest play written in my lifetime." And as a spoof of second-rate theater, Noises Off is indeed clever. But Frayn's script fails to develop the plight of well-meaning but inept people— in theater or any other endeavor.

Absence of empathy

Like Ken Ludwig's Lend Me a Tenor, which I recently reviewed at Act II Playhouse in Ambler, Noises Off is full of multiple slamming doors and pratfalls. But Lend Me a Tenor provides a dramatic conflict that invests the audience in the story's outcome: Will the opera go on? Will the hoax be discovered? Will the nice guy get the girl?

In Noises Off, by contrast, the characters are stick figures for whom we feel no empathy. In any case there are too many of them for us to keep track of.

To its credit, Noises Off is an accomplishment of great intricacy. Many moving parts are examined, literally, from front and back, and many characters are juggled with creative artistry. You have to marvel at the playwright's inventiveness. Yet that inventiveness seems cold and calculating.

Another farcical Cockney

The People's Light crew coped well with the script's challenges. Particularly funny were Christopher Kelly as the leading man of the play-within-a-play, who never can make a verbal point but uses hysterical body language; and David Howey as a besotted older actor who ambles through all the problems with blank equanimity. The rest of the cast presented fine ensemble work.

A decision was made to portray the housekeeper (Marcia Saunders) as common in manner and very Cockney in sound. But why does farce need to be played that broadly? To the contrary, farce demands clarity of speech and surgical precision of movement. Also, this production made Saunders look frumpy and older than she really is, thus discouraging the audience from accepting a romance between this woman and the leading man.

Director Pete Pryor juggled the many parts with skillful fluidity. The two-story set designed by Tony Straiges was impressive, especially when it revolved 180 degrees to show what was going on behind it.

Frayn has updated some of the dialogue from the original 1982 British production, but I'm glad he left in the reference to the pianist Dame Myra Hess, who played on with unflappable determination during Hitler's air raids. I suspect that not many in the Malvern audience understood it, but so what?♦


To read another review by Bill Murphy, click here.