REVIEW: The Farce is Strong With Manic Mayfield Comedy
Michael Frayn’s backstage comedy Noises Off premiered in 1982 and has gone on to become the ultimate classic farce and theatrical in-joke – displaying to hilarious effect how private passions can intrude on public performance.
The comedy has been around for so long that anyone who spends much time in the theatre will have endured some pretty awful nights of forced humour and strangled laughter. Like most farces, those who “get it” will have a wonderful time. If, however, the presenters don’t bring just the right light touch and a sure knowledge of where the laughs are, it can be a long three acts.
Fortunately Mayfield Dinner Theatre Artistic Director Van Wilmott is one of the cognoscente. He has wisely hired canny and sure-handed director Jeremy Webb to helm the evening. The director has carefully curated his production with some excellent farceurs from all over the country. I suspect it helps that writer Michael Frayn has re-written the show many times to keep it up to date. It plays at Mayfield through March 29 – and proves that there is life in the old girl yet.
Somewhere in a small provincial theatre, we find ourselves in the midst of a creaky British sex comedy called Nothing On. Most of the cast are past their due date, but are hoping to start off their tour with some of the old spark. We join them in a late-night dress rehearsal that we quickly see has more pot holes than an Edmonton back alley. Everything that could go wrong does.
In the second act the mock 16th Century Tudor manse (set by John Dinning) is reversed in a spectacular stage move employing a huge revolve. It’s not often that a scene change is met with a burst of applause. We then see the same show from back stage. The first act has established pettiness, hatreds, amorous rivalries, sexual liaisons, physical traps and cunning attempts at sabotage. In this act we see how the troupe lurches through material which has ceased to be the raison d’etre for the show. In Act 3, we catch the last sorry production of the play that has disintegrated into chaos.
Part of Webb’s genius is to recognize there is more than just door slamming absurdity here – although there’s lots of that, too. He realizes the characters have to be expertly drawn, and for all that extravagance and pretension, there is also a sense of regard for theatre in general.
Dotty (a charmingly fuddled Mary-Colin Chisholm) was once a big draw but now she’s headlining this tacky troupe of has-beens and never-weres. Delightfully woozy and perennially confused, the old girl is obsessed with sardines and forever being caught in inadvertent compromising positions. Brooke (Kelly Holiff), who boasts an imposing superstructure, is a no-talent ditz who windmills about the stage declaiming her lines in a bellow and losing her contact lenses – which leaves her blindly stumbling about the stage.
The lofty director of this unfortunate farrago (Cameron MacDuffee) is drowning in the ineptitude of his creaky cast and vainly trying to keep the show afloat. Garrett Ross nails the fretful Frederick who demands “motivation” from the director for even the most insignificant bit of business. His supportive wife, Belinda (Patricia Zentilli) eventually rises to keep what’s left of the play together. Christian Murray is Garry, a short-fused house salesman, who arrives with his amorous paramour Brooke for a weekend romp in the supposedly empty house. Garry constantly challenges the director’s authority but seems quite unable to express just what his objections are.
Of course there is the older hard-of-hearing player Selsdon (Tom Edwards), who’s also a lush. The cast unsuccessfully tries to keep him from the bottles he has stashed about the set. There are a couple of overworked back-stage grunts (Gianna Vacirca and Ben Francis) who cheerfully contribute to the general confusion – and on various panicked occasions don a costume to appear on stage when a frazzled actor fails to make a cue.
All are tricked out in an imposing and unwavering British accent.
After 38 years this manic, silly play remains the precise machine-tooled Rolls Royce of farces. This headlong and hilarious production from the Mayfield tells us that, in this case, the farce is still with us.
Photos by Ed Ellis
