The farce that defies the rules

Michael Frayn's side-splitting Noises Off has a philosophical core that may explain its longevity

- Michael Billington

WHAT gives a play-staying power? The question came to mind when watching the 40th-anniversary production of Michael Frayn's Noises Off at London's Phoenix Theatre. I was seeing the play for the fifth or sixth time and yet I found myself laughing uproariously, as was the rest of the audience, at this gradual falling apart of a fictional British farce titled Nothing On. The kind of door-banging, trouser-dropping farce that Mr Frayn skilfully punctures may have gone out of fashion years ago, but we still delight in its disintegration. Why, exactly?

Most people know by now that in Noises Off we see a nightmare dress rehearsal of Nothing On, followed by a backstage perspective on a live performance and, finally, the show on the last leg of its provincial tour, but, as a wise critic once wrote, 'to narrate the plot of a farce is at best to decant Champagne'. The real reason Noises Off survives is because it is about something that even those of us who don't work in theatre can recognise: the fear that the order we seek to impose on existence will descend into chaos. I am not for a moment suggesting we come out of the theatre talking about the ideas, but there is a philosophical core to Noises Off that you don't find, for instance, in the hugely popular The Play That Goes Wrong, which simply glories in theatre's potential for disaster.