There are plays, there are plays within plays and then there is Noises Off, a play about a play within a play which could quite conceivably be the funniest play ever written.
Michael Frayn's brilliant backstage exposé of theatrical touring life, in which we see an appalling farce falling apart, is so completely realised that it even comes with a programme-within-a-programme, for which Frayn pens a ponderous essay on the semantics of bedroom farce which equates falling trousers with the fall of man and suggests that the symbolic preponderance of doors "offers us a fleeting glimpse of the noumenal". It is a point to bear in mind during the spoof drama, Nothing On, when a surprised burglar pretends to be a plumber and offers us a fleeting glimpse of the urinal.
It is the critic's duty to suggest that farce, like any complex mechanism, is prone to malfunction; and that Frayn, by throwing a spanner into the works, illustrates our fear of the organised structures which govern our lives descending into chaos.
But nobody goes to the theatre for a lecture, and thankfully Philip Wilson's production does not provide one. Instead, you get a symphony of slamming doors and flapping scenery in which the acting could hardly be more wooden and the set could hardly seem less so. Geraldine McNulty is delightful as a garrulous charwoman whose mind seems to be everywhere except the script, and Matthew Cottle looks completely baffled as a man so hopelessly at sea he prefers to wear his trousers at half-mast. In other words, it is perfect.
· Until June 30. Box office: 0151-709 4776.
