Noises Off

Noises Off opens on a technical rehearsal that is going badly: a cast who cannot remember which door they came through, a director losing patience from the stalls, and a plate of sardines nobody can keep track of. The play they are rehearsing is a farce. So is this one.

The first act is that dress rehearsal, seen from the front. The second is the same scene a month later, seen from behind the set and played almost in silence, while the company conducts a full-scale collapse of romances and grudges just out of the audience's earshot. The third is the same scene again, much later, when the production has stopped being able to hold itself together at all.

Michael Frayn wrote it after watching one of his own farces from the wings and deciding the view from back there was funnier. It was first staged in 1982 and has been revived constantly since. It is admired as much for its engineering as for its jokes: the timing is written into the script like clockwork.

The pleasure is watching the machine break down exactly on schedule. Doors, staircases, an axe, a cactus and those sardines all pay off, and the middle act, performed largely in mime, is one of the most demanding sequences written for actors. The laughter is cumulative rather than gag by gag.

Noises Off is for anyone who has ever worked on a show, and for everyone who has not. It is theatre laughing at itself with total affection and absolutely no mercy.