Reviews

Noises Off (Tour – Glasgow)

Theatre is at its most curious when it plays with its own boundaries. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern found themselves at the heart of the non-action, begging for a playwright to tell them how to think and Claudius would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that pesky kid, Hamlet, and his play within a play. The bold Hamlet held a mirror up to nature and here, in his 1981 play, Noises Off, Olivier Lifetime Achievement Award winner Michael Frayn holds a mirror up to the strangeness of the world of theatre. This is a play which plays with the insatiable idiosyncrasies of actors, the flightiness of the farce genre and the throbbing creative insanity of life upon the wicked stage. Revolving around a staging of a fictitious farce called Nothing On, the play follows the trials and tribulations of its cast as they attempt rehearse and stage a typically English comedy where characters drop their trousers, crack bad jokes and slam doors every eight-seconds. But the true lifeblood of the piece is not what goes on onstage but what goes on offstage. The action moves backstage. Life mirrors art which mirrors life which mirrors art and, before long, the biggest farce of all is the splendid decay of a cast on the edge. Our boy Hamlet only had to keep track of two personas: on top of their own selves, the cast members of Noises Off need to understand their stage characters and their stage characters’ characters. Local legend Maureen Beattie’s excellence exists in two concurrent spheres, simultaneously outstanding as theatrical luvvie Dotty and put-upon housekeeper, Mrs. Clackett. Indeed, the cast here are uniformly excellent, eccentric in their stagey stereotypes.This is a production which spends its time building walls between itself and the audience only to gleefully smash them down with wrecking balls of pastiche and irony. Though the action could be quicker and the humour could be sharper, this is a detailed, clever and rich piece of which rewards the observant and the theatrically minded. What it will offer to people not so interested in the genre is altogether less certain. Noises Off is at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until June 1st, 2013.