WHAT is it about the British theatre and it’s love of farce and trouser dropping?
Trousers are round the ankles during a lot of Theatre by the Lake’s current production of Noises Off, playwriter Michael Frayn’s 1980s madcap, hilarious dip into the world of a struggling theatre company on tour.
In fact Noises Off itself is on tour. It is a Theatre by the Lake, New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich, Queens Theatre Hornchurch and Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg production which can be seen at Keswick until Saturday 26 July.
It’s said that Michael Frayn was watching a play when the realisation struck him; why not write about a play that concentrates on what goes on behind the scenes. It might be more interesting. Noises Off refers to what happens, often disastrously, behind the curtain.
It is a reviewer’s dream with a terrific, highly energetic cast.
But the line that sums it up perfectly was handed to me on a plate by one of the great artistic directors of the generation, Sir Gregory Doran, when we were chatting after the press night performance last Thursday.
Gregory Doran is a former Keswick theatre director who spent 35 years with the RSC in Stratford, during which time he laid claim to having directed each and every Shakespeare play, several of them starring his late partner Sir Anthony Sher.
He was just quietly sneaking away from the theatre when I caught up with him. He’s currently directing The Government Inspector at the Chichester Festival, but had taken the opportunity of seeing a play while spending some time in Keswick.
It was, said Gregory, an exhausting play to watch. A test of the actors’ physical agility—and he reminded me they’d already done a matinee show that afternoon.
It was, he said, a perfect example of theatrical “plate spinning.” Sir Gregory Doran
In other words, keeping so many aspects of action going on stage at any one moment. So much so you wondered if the whole thing was about to descend into chaos. But that was the point. The story is about a bunch of actors whose professional life is spent stressfully touring lesser provincial theatres and it is meant to be chaotic. Stockton-on-Tees appears to hold particular terrors.
The ingredients for farce are all there. Lots of doors and exits. In the second act you see the play from behind the stage where relationships are becoming strained as the play they are performing, Nothing On, nears the end of a ten week tour.
There is a sequence that owes itself to silent movies where the cast are speaking with hand gestures at 100 miles an hour while doors open and close and you can just hear the actors out front.
Act one is the night before they open. Harry Long is a frustrated director, who clearly thinks he’s better than this. It’s all falling apart, Hilary Maclean’s housekeeper can’t remember where she’s put the sardines and the phone. Sardines are the standing joke in Noises Off.
George Kemp’s Garry is an actor who, in real life, can never seem to express himself or complete a sentence. Kemp takes giant strides across the stage, falls down stairs, and is very athletic.
Ailsa Joy has the wonderful role of Brooke Ashton who spends most of the time dashing up and down stairs in and out of various rooms in her underwear or posing sexily for attention.
You can’t fault the whole cast or the backstage crew. The latter were brought on for a bow at the end having transformed the stage between the second and third acts when the audience was asked to stay in their seats and be treated to an insight into what goes on normally out of sight.
Hisham Abdul Razek, as property owner and tax refugee Freddie Fellows, was an accomplished nose-bleeding trouser dropper, as was Russell Richardson’s drunken elderly actor Selsdon. A reminder of the time when I used to go to Whitehall farces, and it wouldn’t have been a farce without an embarrassed and trouserless vicar.
You have to get through a first act, which explains the complexity of a play within a play. But stick with it. Once it gets frantic, the whole essence of a good farce, the timing and the energy, is there in bundles. Oh, and they do keep a lot of metaphorical plates spinning.
Photos by Craig Fuller