Noises Off thrills as slapstick, chaos and precision collide

Michael Frayn's farce plunges audiences into a madcap whirlwind in which slapstick comedy, mishaps and meticulously choreographed timing combine, showcasing both professional and student actors in riotously precise comic mayhem

- By Keith Bain

Don't worry about following the plot of Noises Off, the 1982 Michael Frayn comedy that is showing at Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town. What starts as a mildly unnerving last-minute technical rehearsal for a play that's due to begin in just a few hours rapidly descends into complete and utter pandemonium.

If it feels like the storyline is getting away from you, it's because it's getting away from everyone, including the harried cast of characters actors, stagehands and one director nearing the end of his tether.

Although we're ostensibly witnessing a behind-the-scenes meltdown of a frankly appalling sex comedy, in reality this farce is an opportunity for a masterful writer to reveal the mechanics of comedy's complex calculus and to demonstrate an inordinate number of ways in which the human funny bone can be triggered with just about zero cerebral engagement.

By the time the farce-within-a-farce's long-suffering director, Lloyd Dallas (played with irresistible charm by Aidan Scott, one of two professional actors who add their mettle to what is ostensibly a student production), manages to drag his hapless actors through their final rehearsal, you might imagine that things can't get any worse.

But you'd be entirely wrong.

Act 1, which introduces us to the foibles of the various characters who've contracted themselves to a terribly written sex farce, is merely a prelude to a bewildering meta-theatrical account of just how off kilter things can go when the madness of real life imposes itself on the neatly ordered structure of a playwright's vision.