The Play That Goes Wrong

There is something intrinsically attractive about the idea of well-meaning performers producing chaotic, hopeless plays as the glory of live theatre is precisely that: major mistakes can happen. Shakespeare had the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performing Pyramus and Thisby for the city’s royalty, and Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off extended the genre.

In a similar spirit, The Play That Goes Wrong charts the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s ill-fated production of Murder At Haversham Manor. In fact, everything that can go wrong with a play goes wrong for this Mousetrap-style murder mystery.

Henry Shields plays the director and seems to be channelling a long-suffering Basil Fawlty, immensely relieved that at least the company has enough actors to stage this play, unlike their production of ‘Two Sisters’ by Chekhov.

Henry Lewis as the old Etonian, bearded chief suspect is a dab hand at slapstick, while Jonathan Sayer is a weasel-faced butler who, finding the whiskey prop missing, makes use of white spirit instead. Dave Hearn is a perpetually mugging, elasticlimbed clown, forever hogging the limelight. In Act 2 the conflict between Charlie Russell’s Sandra Wilkinson, an overblown vamp in a red dress and her jealous understudy, played by Nancy Wallinger, leads to a hilarious fight. Rob Falconer’s music effectively pastiches the cheesy murder thriller, while Nigel Hook’s ingenious set, with its proclivity for catastrophic collapse and disintegration, gives the cast the opportunity to demonstrate enviable skills in physical comedy.

Although there is genuine comic talent on display here, I found the sheer relentlessness of the gags exhausting, a surfeit that made it hard to appreciate each one. However, it should be said that plenty of the audience were laughing so hard that they were virtually rolling in the aisles.

Others, though, might balk at what is in essence an overextended fringe skit, where the play-within-a-play is more or less everything we see.

Shakespeare’s mechanicals in Midsummer Night’s Dream evoke our sympathy because we know and feel for them as people, quite apart from their bumbling performance of Pyramus and Thisby. In Noises Off the tension between offstage friction and onstage mishaps is the motor to explore character and the psychological peculiarity of being an actor. The Play That Goes Wrong, by contrast, is a festival of disasters: hammy acting; out-ofsync dialogue; misplaced props; stuck doors and a disintegrating set and a stage-management team required to understudy.

Until 1 February at the Duchess Theatre, London WC2: 0844-482 9672, www.nimaxtheatres.com