It’s hard to screw up Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off. Its solidity comes from its structure. If you don’t know the British backstage comedy, it’s a three-part theme and variation.
In the first act, you’re watching the final rehearsal for a British comedy. We mostly stumble through the first act of the play within a play. We get a sense of the basic storyline that centers around a supposedly empty house in the country that’s up for rent. The owners, we learn, have fled the country to avoid tax charges and they’ve left their maid in charge of things. What's more, the real estate agent has — thinking the house was empty — come over for a midday assignation with a young woman. What ensues is a series of close misses and slamming doors — the typical mechanics of farce. To round out the cast, we have a burglar who’s come to rob the place and (given that it’s ultimately a backstage comedy) we have the director, a stage manager, and a beleaguered TD... and sardines. Sardines are a key prop.
Now, if that sounds sort of meh — it’s supposed to be a middling touring production of a not-great play. Act one is the structural setup. Then, in act two the house flips around. (And it must literally flip around because anytime someone says "We should do Noises Off," someone in the meeting always replies, "Well, we’ll need a turntable.") We are watching the antics backstage during a performance of that same act we saw in act one. The missed entrances and exits are now behind the scenes and we see the backstage drama as the actors have descended into a sort of relational chaos. The fun is we know the structure and the timing of the “play” that’s happening on the other side of the stage set.
For act three, the house flips around again and we’re watching another performance late in their run where the wheels have completely fallen off the production and everyone is done with it all. A study in theatrical entropy if you will.
Usually, the structure is enough to carry a production through. It’s a clever play on dramatic irony as the audience gets to see behind the curtain and then the curtain shifts. The key is the break between what we think is going on and what’s actually going on. This is when the play breaks the fourth wall and we start exploring the difference between the performance of the play and the ‘real’ actors — there has to be something solid there.
The challenge for the co-production between the Geffen Playhouse and Steppenwolf Theatre Company production that’s currently at the Geffen Playhouse is that when the mask comes off, there’s another mask. This production plays at the British actor stereotype rather than grounding us in real people who, even though the circumstances become absurd, we can empathize with on some level. The performances of the ‘actors’ who are performing the play are so broad and general that it’s hard to care or even really be shocked or thrilled when we get to see the ‘real’ them.
Act two still has enough physical comedy to get some honest laughs, but by act three, you’ll be way ahead of the production. To be fair, the British sex comedy genre hasn’t aged well so it’s understandable why you wouldn’t want to really ground the production in the reality of a director who slept with his assistant while dating the ingenue. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It might be time for us to let go of Noises Off and its solid structure.
Noises Off plays at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood through March 9th.
This is Anthony Byrnes opening the curtain of LA Theater for KCRW.