If you’ve gotten the winter blues after weeks of icy sidewalks and frigid wind chills, I have good news for you: you still have one week left to see Jeremy Webb’s Noises Off at Neptune Theatre, which is sure to make you laugh and help you leave the theatre a little more lighthearted than you were when you went in.
The play was written in 1982 by British playwright Michael Frayn, who was inspired to write a “farce from behind” while watching The Two of Us from the wings once in 1970, and realizing that what was happening offstage was funnier than the play. Noises Off centres on a cast of actors who are taking the fictional sex farce Nothing On by Robin Housemonger on tour to theatres across England. We see Act I of Nothing On play out three times, taking us from the frantic Technical Rehearsal to a chaotic performance near the end of the ten-week run at the Grand Theatre in Stockton-On-Tees. The fun lies in seeing how the antics onstage steadily deteriorate as the actors’ relationships with one another backstage become increasingly tense, complicated, and dramatic.
It is interesting how Frayn constructs this play. The First Act functions as a base level, where the sex farce is performed mostly the way it was intended, although the actors in the play-within-the-play struggle at times with their lines and blocking, especially Dotty Otley as Mrs. Clackett (Mary-Colin Chisholm), who has near constant business with a plate of sardines, and this becomes one of Noises Off’s primary running gags. Nothing On is written to be humorous, but, especially since we never see its second act, it’s slow to reveal what the stakes are, but knowing how the play is supposed to work is integral for the Second and Third Acts, when everything suddenly becomes hilariously un-hinged, and the stakes become us, the audience, and whether the actors will be able to salvage the play for us. The worse things get for Nothing On, the funnier things are for Noises Off, and as the play unfolds the more we delight in what goes terribly wrong.
One of the first stars that we see in this production is John Dinning’s looming set of stairs and doors (everything one needs for a sex farce), which then revolves around magically (and with much theatrical flourish) to reveal the back of Nothing On’s set, also made up largely of back staircases and the other sides of doors.
The second star is Mary-Colin Chisholm as Dotty Otley, a soap opera star making her “triumphant” return to the stage as the cockney housekeeper Mrs. Clackett. While the bits with the sardines are iconic to this play, I found Chisholm’s timing with the telephone to be the funniest. Dotty is dating Gary Lejeune (Christian Murray), the insecure actor who plays Roger who has difficulty finishing his sentences, and Gary’s constant paranoia about Dotty cheating on him is one of the major crises for Nothing On. For those in the audience who know that Chisholm and Murray are partners in real life, there’s an additional layer of fun. Murray is an expert at physical comedy, and his slapstick skills here are exactly what all Dinning’s stairs and doors were built for. I wish Frayn had found a way to weave more of Dotty and Gary’s relationship into the First Act, because we don’t really get a strong sense of it until it’s off the rails, but we do get the sense that it’s all a huge miscommunication that may end up coming out right in the end.
Walter Borden’s Selsdon Mowbray is a seasoned Shakespearean actor now playing a burglar in a farce touring to such places as Ashton-under-Lyne. He is mostly deaf and has a drinking problem, which means that whenever he isn’t in the immediate vicinity the other cast members assume he has gotten into some kind of trouble and needs to be rescued. Borden’s Selsdon plays the unnamed burglar in Nothing On as though he were trying to play Lear, and wanders around largely blithely oblivious to everything else, since he is so hard of hearing. Kirstin Howell plays Brooke Ashton, an actor with an inability to improvise, and a penchant for losing her contact lens onstage. She also remains mostly oblivious to everything else, as she seems to spend most of her time offstage daydreaming. Howell has great comic timing and, even amid pandemonium, her performance as Brooke playing Vicki seems effortless.
Theofani Pitsiavas plays Frederick Fellowes, an actor continually apologizing for his need to understand his lines and find his motivation. Pitsiavas also brings his great skills as a physical comedian to the play. Sarah O’Brecht plays Belinda Blair, the ever-frazzled peacemaker who will jump through hoops in attempt to save the show. Belinda is very much the “straight (wo)man” of the ensemble, and O’Brecht really shines in this role. The drama is not just reserved for the stage, Karen Bassett’s emotional Assistant Stage Manager, Poppy Norton-Taylor, is also a highlight of the show. Although, it doesn’t feel like there is enough stage time for Poppy or Bill Carr’s exasperated director Lloyd Dallas to adequately showcase his and Bassett’s talents.
Director Jeremy Webb fills Noises Off to the very brim with silliness. There is a lot here; so much, in fact, that I know I could go back at least a second, and maybe a third time, and still find details that I completely missed. The biggest feat for Webb is that by the middle of the Third Act it seems as though everything is happening completely at random, that no one knows what will happen next, and that the whole play has disintegrated into a giant uncoordinated mess, when in fact, of course, the opposite is true, and every movement on stage is specifically marked, entirely safe, carefully choreographed, and blocked to create this allusion of chaos, and that is done masterfully.
There are a lot of big hearty laughs in Noises Off. If you like backstage comedies, and plays that poke fun at all the stereotypes associated with actors and the theatre, I think you will really love this show. The cast works well together as an ensemble, allowing for everyone to take their moments, and also to layer silliness upon silliness atop silliness to great effect. It’s also wonderful to see Walter Borden and Bill Carr back on the Fountain Hall stage after such a long time. I hope to see them both back again soon.
Noises Off plays at Neptune Theatre’s Fountain Hall stage (1593 Argyle Street) until March 17, 2019. Performances are Tuesday to Friday at 7:30pm and Saturday and Sunday at 2pm & 7:30pm. For tickets please CLICK HERE or call 902-429-7070 (toll-free 1-800-565-7345) or visit the Box Office at 1593 Argyle Street.
