This post finds me in London, England, attending a play on the West End for the first time in about 15 years! This production is on stage now at the Duchess Theatre.
The Play That Goes Wrong
by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Burke and Henry Shields
Staged by Mischief Theatre Company
This script is a collective piece written by 3 of the 8 cast members. If you are familiar with Michael Frayn's now-classic farce Noises Off you will have a bit of an idea of the tone of this show. Transfer the play from professional to community theatre, remake it into a terrible murder mystery, toss in every stereotype of bad "church-basement" acting and staging that you can imagine, push the resulting mix of disaster and mayhem far past the bounds of probability, and you've got the idea. The comparison to Noises Off is bound to occur to anyone familiar with that play. This one begins at the stage of disintegration which is reached in the third act of Noises Off, and continues downhill from there.
Is it great theatre? No, but it is great fun if you can take off your critic's hat long enough to start laughing. I certainly could! And I did enjoy the evening a great deal!
The show begins even before the show begins, so to speak. As we were enjoying a drink in the bar, two cast members who portray the stage crew were roaming around, looking for a dog that was supposed to appear in the show and had escaped. The hunt for the missing dog also continued during the intermission. As well, the stage crew invited a member of the audience up on stage to help hold the mantel in place while it was being fixed. All this, remember, even before the "official" curtain time was reached! At 7:00 the "director" appears and gives a horrible parody of a community theatre director's welcome speech.
The ensuing performance is so awful that it becomes funny. There's nothing more fascinating than watching a company of skilled professionals doing as badly as possible what they have trained themselves for years to do well. Everyone in the company has to strike ridiculously "theatrical" poses, mispronounce words, mug shamelessly for laughs, look for friends out front, and so on. The "stage manager", sitting on a steel catwalk up on the wall to the right of the auditorium, gets caught texting and misses a cue. The "director" actually appears as a character, and proves to be just as inept on stage as his actors. Set pieces, drop, fall, jam, and even collapse.
The most derivative part of the script is the moment when the crew girl has to go on for the female lead, and then another accident happens and the stage manager has to go on for the crew girl. What happens then veers wildly back into more manic and original territory.
The skill with which the 8 performers and their real director navigate the treacherous hazards of this slapstick show is certainly admirable!
What we don't see or hear anything of is the private lives of the hopelessly inept people portraying these cardboard characters. In Noises Off the show is really about the characters of the actors, not of the parts they are playing in the hopelessly bad farce Nothing On. I think the biggest weakness of The Play That Goes Wrong lies in the fact that this script simply shows you the performance, start to finish, of The Murder at Haversham Manor. The crucial "middle layer", so to speak, the lives of the members of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, is utterly omitted from the script. Result: the entire show becomes simply a gigantic caricature, and thus is simply two-dimensional.
Energetic? Absolutely. Funny? Definitely -- but just once. Staying power? Frankly, I doubt it. I will be very surprised if this show ever achieves the world-wide classic status which Noises Off rightly enjoys.
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