What irony! Just as Michael Frayn’s famous farce about the thin line between order and chaos was reaching its second-act climax, the stage lights suddenly went out. Play, on the press night, was resumed after an awkward five-minute hiatus, but it says much about the durability of Frayn’s play that it survived this proof of his thesis about theatre’s unpredictability.
Seeing it 37 years after its debut at this venue, two things strike me. One is that we still find Noises Off funny, even though the antic farce it is parodying – entitled Nothing On and carrying echoes of Ben Travers and Brian Rix – is now as foreign to us as the country-house thriller. The other is that a whole new genre has emerged, typified by The Play That Goes Wrong, that capitalises on Frayn’s delight in theatre’s fragility. If I find Frayn’s play far wittier, it is for a variety of reasons: it not only suggests that in farce the mayhem backstage beats anything taking place in front of an audience, but also that theatre is a place where private passions periodically intrude on public performance.
One test of any revival, and it is one that Jeremy Herrin’s production largely passes, is that you should feel that the Nothing On company is composed of querulous eccentrics. Jonathan Cullen stands out as the kind of fretful actor always seeking a rational motivation for farce’s giddy mechanics and Daniel Rigby runs him close as a bullish extrovert who challenges the director’s authority without ever quite being able to finish a sentence. Meera Syal might make more of the seen-it-all-before weariness of Dotty, the sardine-obsessed housekeeper, but there is good work from Simon Rouse as a permanently sozzled veteran, Lloyd Owen as the lordly director and Lois Chimimba as an exploited stage manager. Occasionally, I thought Herrin, in the backstage scene, was overdoing the joke of Dotty’s being discovered in supposedly compromising positions. But Frayn’s play is like a piece of clockwork that still functions impeccably almost 40 years after its invention.
• At the Lyric Hammersmith, London, until 27 July.
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