Wednesday afternoon; a British country home. The phone rings, and a housekeeper named Mrs. Clackett galumphs in from the servants’ quarters, carrying a plate of sardines. In a weary Cockney accent, she informs the caller that her employer is in Spain. His wife’s in Spain, too. She blanches. “Am I in Spain? No, I’m not in Spain, dear.” She hangs up and begins to leave, as her accent suddenly jumps up several socioeconomic notches and she mumbles to herself, “And I take the sardines. No, I leave the sardines. No, I take the sardines.”
If Mrs. Clackett seems like a stock character in a British comedy—the grouchy, bumbling maid—that’s because she is one. We are watching the dress rehearsal for a play called “Nothing On,” whose doomed tour through English towns like Ashton-under-Lyne and Stockton-on-Tees is the subject of “Noises Off,” Michael Frayn’s ingenious 1982 farce within a farce. A sort of theatrical turducken, the play has a lot to tell us about the comedy of chaos. Paradoxically, it only works when it runs like clockwork: everything has to go right for everything to go so wrong. Fortunately, the Roundabout’s revival, which just opened at the American Airlines Theatre, under the shipshape direction of Jeremy Herrin, nails nearly every slamming door, pants-around-the-ankles pratfall, and flung plate of sardines.
About those sardines: keep your eye on them. And on the telephone. And on the newspaper Mrs. Clackett can’t remember whether to take offstage. By magnifying the minutiae—props, cues, stuck doorknobs—Frayn blows up perhaps the most banal aspect of theatre-making to absurd proportions. Or, as Lloyd (Campbell Scott), the beleaguered director of “Nothing On,” puts it, “That’s what it’s all about. Doors and sardines. Getting on, getting off. Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off. That’s farce. That’s the theatre. That’s life.” It’s not until we see every exit and entrance go absurdly, madly, hilariously askew that we begin to see his point. Viewed from a certain angle, life is about little things that can slip, crack, and slam in our faces.
Perhaps that’s why “Noises Off” is such a crowd-pleaser, frequently revived and frequently beloved. Over three acts, we follow the accident-prone actors as their missed cues and accumulating rivalries lead to catastrophe for “Nothing On” but hilarity for “Noises Off.” Sardines fly, cactuses are sat upon. Frayn gives each character just enough distinction to make the tomfoolery comprehensible. Dotty (the wonderful Andrea Martin), who plays the housekeeper, is a slumming grand dame. Brooke (Megan Hilty), who plays a blond bimbo, keeps losing her contact lenses. Selsdon (Daniel Davis) is a drunk. (The rest of the ace ensemble includes Jeremy Shamos, David Furr, and Kate Jennings Grant, as actors, and Tracee Chimo and Rob McClure, as hapless stagehands.) Likewise, the characters they play in “Nothing On” have only one or two quirks apiece. The point isn’t to delve into individual psychology but to marvel at the extremity of gracelessness, choreographed with meticulous grace.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the middle act, when the set of “Nothing On” is flipped around and we watch the backstage antics of a particularly ill-fated performance. Showmances have gone sour; shoelaces and bouquets and whiskey bottles seem to have devilish lives of their own. It was during this act that I finally stopped laughing long enough to sit back and appreciate the show’s unlikely finesse. In the backstage hush, there’s little talking—but much panic and confusion—and the near-wordlessness of the chaos took on the abstract beauty of a dance piece or a kaleidoscope, not to mention the structural daring of a Pirandello play. (Six character actors in search of their next line?)
Frayn, now in his eighties, has likely made a small fortune from “Noises Off”—you may recall the so-so movie version, starring Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, and Christopher Reeve—but he earned his acclaim, and a 2000 Tony Award, for “Copenhagen,” about a mysterious meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. How did the impish author of “Noises Off” produce such high-minded historical drama? In both plays, form follows function: in “Copenhagen,” the enigma of human behavior mimics Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, with the three characters (including Bohr’s wife, Margrethe) circling the stage like subatomic particles. And both plays are concerned with ethics, though you may need to squint to see their place in “Noises Off.” In the introduction to one of his collections (quoted in Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2004 profile), Frayn writes, “Farce is a brutally difficult form. It is also of course a despised one. In laughing at it you have lost your moral dignity, and you don’t like to admit it afterwards.”
Still, there’s far more joy than shame in “Noises Off.” Like a Bond movie packed with one ridiculous escape after another, it derives its thrill from physical improbability. No sequence of bloopers could ever be this balletic—and, if it were, we’d be too stuck in our own sardine juice to notice. In Frayn’s faultless rendering of a world where little things always go wrong, there’s an inverse model of intelligent design. So it’s no surprise that “Noises Off” flirts, however briefly, with the theological. “I’m starting to know what God felt like when he sat out there in the darkness creating the world,” Lloyd, the director, says, watching his dress rehearsal fall to pieces. “What did he feel like, Lloyd, my love?” one of the actors inquires. Lloyd pops a pill and replies, “Very pleased he’d taken his Valium.”
