Successfully depicting the descent of an already awful farce into hopeless chaos requires precision engineering. Directed by Mark Rhea, Keegan Theatre’s production of Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s classic farce, nails the details and the timing. Hilarity ensues.
Through Noises Off’s play-within-a-play, Nothing On, Frayn takes on an egregious British genre unaccountably popular in the 1970s and ’80s: the sex farce in which nobody gets to have sex. Think No Sex Please, We’re British or Run for Your Wife.
In Act One, Nothing On’s director, Lloyd (Jared H. Graham), fights a desperate battle to pull together the show’s final dress rehearsal. The odds are against him, given a cast that would test the sanity of any director. Consider:
- Dotty (Susan Rhea), playing a housekeeper who can’t quite manage to juggle a phone, a newspaper, and various plates of sardines in the proper order.
- Frederick (Michael Innocenti), as a tax avoider given to nosebleeds at inconvenient moments and angst about his motivation.
- Belinda (Valerie Adams Rigsbee), as Frederick’s confused and jealous wife.
- Brooke (Brigid Wallace Harper), as a sexy but ditsy ingenue prone to excessively dramatic gestures onstage and excessive breathing and stretching exercises offstage.
- Gary (Ryan Sellers), using his estate agent’s access to Frederick and Belinda’s house in a frustrated attempt at a tryst with Brooke.
- Selsden (Timothy H. Lynch), who is never quite sure when to make an entrance as an over-the-hill burglar.
Complicating their performances are tangled off-stage relationships. Lloyd is involved with both Brooke and Poppy (Casi Demming), the assistant stage manager, suffering the consequences of trying to keep two women happy. Gary is involved with the considerably older Dotty, who in turn flirts with any man in sight, fueling Belinda’s jealousy. Despite all this, the motley crew finally finish their rehearsal.
Frayn has said that the inspiration for Noises Off was his experience of watching one of his earlier plays from backstage. And so, after the set rotates on Keegan’s new turntable during the first intermission, we see the second act from backstage. The set, designed by Matthew J. Keenan, is delightful front and back, including the 10 doors — somewhat above average even for a farce — that feature prominently in the actors’ comings and goings.
It is in this backstage setting that Noises Off hits its peak. A month into Nothing On’s tour, things have deteriorated. The actors and harried stage manager Tim Allgood (Gary DuBreuil) scurry to prevent utter disaster on stage while averting mayhem offstage. They talk or quarrel with one another in pantomime while managing intricate choreography with props. A slapstick ballet with a fire ax stands out, but flowers, bottles of booze, the ever-present sardines, and a cactus have their turns as well. Cindy Landrum Jacobs’ prop design is another virtue of the production.
As typical in farce — with some clear antecedents in the commedia dell’arte tradition — the play’s style is heavy on elaborately contrived, improbable plotting; exaggerated but well-coordinated physical acting; pratfalls; intentionally obvious line readings; and even a pants-around-the-ankles moment. One of the many gems was a point at which various actors, seemingly oblivious to her presence, step over Brooke, as she lies on the stage doing one of her breathing exercises.
By the time we reach the third act, at the end of Nothing On’s 12-week tour through obscure venues, matters have reached their nadir. Relationships are in tatters; the actors’ lines, entrances, and exits bear at best a tangential relationship to the original script; no one knows quite where they’re going; props are mislaid or (in the case of an unusually long telephone cord) hopelessly tangled; and everyone has reached the point of exhaustion. All that remains is to bring a final curtain down on the whole weary affair.
When I first saw Noises Off some decades ago, it struck me as the most roll-in-the-aisles funny play I had ever seen. While generating plenty of well-earned laughs, more recent viewings haven’t felt quite as uproarious to me. That’s no criticism of this production, which Keegan pulls off with panache. In particular, the second act is as virtuosic an example of ensemble playing and brilliantly on-point timing as I can imagine.
Now that we are far further removed in time from the ’70s/’80s-style bedroom farces that the first act spoofs, however, its satire on that form may have lost some of its edge, even when as well performed as in this production. And, in a perhaps more pessimistic time than 1982, when the show premiered, the third act feels more than anything else to be about the inexorable triumph of entropy (something to which Frayn gives attention in a quite different way toward the end of his wonderful Copenhagen, which I dearly hope Keegan will schedule in a future season).
I think it fair to give the playwright a final word on his view of the world of Noises Off. Writing in 1985, Frayn said, “The fear that haunts [the actors] is that the unlearned and unrehearsed — the great chaos behind the set, inside the heart and brain — will seep back on the stage. The prepared words will vanish; the planned responses will be inappropriate. Their performance will break down and they will be left in front of us, naked and ashamed.” It is what makes Noises Off terrifyingly funny.
Running Time: Two hours and 30 minutes, including two intermissions.
EXTENDED: Noises Off plays through September 8, 2024, at Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church Street NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets ($55; $45 for students and seniors) online, by email (boxoffice@keegantheatre.com), by calling the box office at (202) 265-3767, or in person at the Keegan Theatre Box Office, which opens on the day of the show one hour before the performance.
Cast and creative credits are online here (scroll down).
COVID Safety: Masks are optional but encouraged. Keegan’s Health and Safety policies are here.
