'Noises Off' by Michael Frayn, regarded as one of the world’s best farces, is still fresh, furious, and able to make an audience weep with laughter. This co-production of Theatre Royal Bath and Birmingham Rep was performed at the Storyhouse, Chester.
Designer Simon Higlett’s set was of the living room and upper hallway of an upper middle-class country house with a vague touch of chintz to suggest the 1980s, but not quite going there. There were a lot of doors, both downstairs and upstairs, and they spent a lot of time being slammed. The costumes were not quite modern dress, not quite twentieth century sex comedy, but very cheerful-looking and reflective of the characters’ personalities. Sound designer Gregory Clarke had a recurring motif of light-hearted music that was like the opening to every cosy sitcom made in the latter twentieth century. A happy company of actors were in dress rehearsal for their new tour of “Nothing On”, opening in Weston-Super-Mare in twelve hours’ time.
And then the subversion began.
Simon Shepherd was quite special as the director Lloyd Dallas. Having got through the dress rehearsal with hangdog patience, he became the backstage dynamo of the Ashton-under-Lyne performance, and finally the despairing saviour of the meltdown that occurred in Stockton-on-Tees. Acid was never far from his tongue, but it could be curdled with milk.
The ensemble of actors and stage managers that made up the rest of the company was a tight-paced ensemble that were on fire during the backstage depiction of Ashton-under-Lyne. This entire act was spent in dumbshow: actors were performing their lines to an invisible audience on the other side of the set, and we were backstage seeing a frantic silent-film-style display of jealous lovers; missing props; a whisky-seeking alcoholic; successions of bouquets of flowers, sardines, a cactus and a fire axe; and descents into nosebleeds and lost contact lenses. It was the best execution of “Noises Off”’s Act Two that this reviewer has ever seen. Huge, huge compliments to the cast.
Liza Goddard went from stock character cleaning lady Dotty Otley to Brechtian madwoman by the end of the play. Simon Coates was full of wet-eyed pathos as Frederick Fellowes, the actor who can never quite keep up with what’s going on. Lucy Robinson’s joie de vivre grew larger and more painfully exaggerated as her character Belinda Blair tried to be the mother hen to the rest of the company.
Mark Middleton, as Garry Lejeune, was a sleazy housing agent on the stage and built up to being a seethingly green-eyed Casanova off it. Lisa Ambalavanar showed herself to be a very clever actor playing the very fluffy-brained soubrette Brooke Ashton. Daniel Rainford had a deer-in-the-headlights expression as stage manager Tim Allgood. Nikhita Lesler brought a kooky edge to the put-upon stage manager Poppy Norton-Taylor. Paul Bradley amiably wandered through the chaos as elderly (and either tipsy or asleep) actor Selsdon Mowbray.
The real director, Lindsay Posner, has done a dazzling job of keeping so many technical elements in the air at once with a juggler’s precision, as well as using some beautiful scenography in Act Two. And the audience loved it.
No comments:
Post a Comment