Noises Off - Stephen Joseph Theatre ★★★★

Since Michael Frayn‘s breathless farce, Noises Off, first premiered at the Lyric Hammersmith, then at the Savoy Theatre in London’s West End in 1982, it has had success on either side of the Atlantic – with various casts over the years including such luminaries as Patricia Routledge, Paul Eddington, Lynn Redgrave, Stephen Mangan, Patti LuPone, Janie Dee, Celia Imrie, Megan Hilty and Daniel Rigby, to name but a few. The show, centring around a troubled company of jobbing actors touring a bothersome and particularly lame British sex comedy, Nothing On, is inevitably seen as a forerunner to The Play That Goes Wrong series.

So it doesn’t seem a particularly bold choice for Scarborough’s iconic Stephen Joseph Theatre’s artistic director Paul Robinson to direct – until you consider that the venue is seated in the round. The question posed leaps from an unconvinced ‘Why?’ to a highly-excitable ‘How?’

The three-act structure of Frayn’s comic masterpiece provides challenges to both actors and designers under normal circumstances. Act I is revealed to be the eleventh-hour-verging-on-midnight tech of the (fictitious) sex comedy Nothing On. The audience watches the characters performing on the show’s set, the living room of a country home – and then sees the actors break character to take instructions from their increasingly dyspeptic director. Forgotten lines, lack of character motivation, doors that won’t open or close and an inordinate amount of business with plates of sardines are just some of the problems multiplying at the tour’s far-from-ready opening night in Weston-super-Mare.

The middle act sees the same scene played out, a month later, but from a backstage perspective – with interpersonal issues between members of the cast erupting into jealousies, storming off, rows, misunderstandings and even an axe being wielded.

The third act is at the dying embers of a 10-week tour with relationships between the cast either tired or bitter, props continuing to be unruly, accidents happening and the cast needing to ad-lib to cover the chaos and salvage the plot for the audience.

The technical triumph of designer Kevin Jenkins is that he doesn’t simply flip some doors around to represent the onstage set and the backstage area; instead, he reimagines the reverse as if it were the backstage of an in-the-round theatre, such as the Stephen Joseph. This means that entire door frames that fill the theatre’s vomitoria (the tunnel entrances to the stage between the seating) are swapped around between the acts. The geographical detail is mindbending and really places “the theatre” as a central character in this production. And kudos to Ernest Acquah‘s superb sound design that delivers off-stage speech from corresponding parts of Jenkin’s theatre structure.

And full credit to this extraordinary cast whose moves, reversed within each act, are akin to 3D chess! It’s quite a feat of memory to remember such complex blocking at the same time as your character is forgetting theirs.

Susan Twist, seen in the two most recent series of Doctor Who, brings you the gift of laughter. Her Dotty Otley plays Mrs Clackett with a befuddlement that Julie Walters would be proud of. She displays real skill differentiating between her long-running TV actress character and her role in the play within a play.

Fast-paced farces can often lean towards rather stilted performances, but Olivia Woolhouse‘s brilliant Brooke is so natural and naturally funny, it’s as if she is entirely oblivious to the chaos around her. Alex Phelps gives a vigour and a physicality to Garry Lejeune, Nothing On‘s leading man and Dotty’s volatile paramour. There is a fine line in larger-than-life characterisation to tread between hilarious and irritating, and Phelps stays on the right side throughout.

Appropriately enough for someone playing a burglar, Christopher Godwin steals the show. As the partly deaf, old Thesp, Selsdon Mowbray bags the biggest laughs of the night with impeccable comic timing.

Often called the funniest farce ever written, this SJT production is both funny and fascinating in equal measure. This first-ever staging of Noise Off in the round reshapes the piece. Watching Act 2 from four sides – which is played pretty much as a silent comedy so as not to disturb the ongoing ‘performance’ – it increases the freneticism and the danger of the slapstick. The chaos is no longer contained within a neat proscenium arch – instead the action threatens to spill into the audience in a way that is thrilling to watch. By contrast, the third act loses some focus because it’s in the round. The humour needs to be condensed and focused for the final lap, but in the openness of the auditorium, the momentum somewhat dissipates before it can crawl across the finish line.

This production of Noises Off is a classy, bold affair that will tickle your funny bone as well as blow your mind.