When Michael Frayn created Noises Off, one the cleverest comedies ever written for the stage, it became almost impossible to revive the form of theatre that inspired it – the good old-fashioned British farce.
The trouser-dropping, door-slamming form dominated the West End with The Aldwych Theatre farces of the 1920s, followed by Brian Rix’s Whitehall entertainments in the 1950s and 60s. When Ray Cooney’s Run for Your Wife installed itself in the West End in the early 80s, Frayn’s meta creation, which is set behind the scenes and on the stage of a country-house farce, was hard on its heels. Audiences lapped up the combination of broad comedy and cleverness and suddenly straight farce seemed as dated as a Carry On film.
But since 2013, when Mischief performed their seminal show The Play That Goes Wrong at London’s Red Lion Theatre, the company has made farce respectable again. The show went on to conquer the West End and Broadway and also begat a series that had the same premise of a hapless troupe of am-dram players who soldier on as their production and its set disintegrates around them.
This show, however, is rooted in the comedy of chaos when people lose control of the deadly serious occupation of espionage.
Set in 1960s Cold War London the Russian and American spooks here are as hapless as Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English and as bewildered as Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau. Caught in the middle is cake-maker Bernard Wright, played by Mischief co-founder and co-writer Henry Lewis.
Bernard has booked himself into the hotel where most of the action is set to deliver a surprise marriage proposal to his girlfriend Rosemary (Adele James) who is on a business trip. Initially mistaking him for an MI6 double agent, the Russian spies (Charlie Russell and Chris Leask) and the Americans (Nancy Zamit and Dave Hearn) each conscript poor Bernard into their operation to spy on the opposition – first as an agent, then as a double agent, then triple…you get the picture.
As with all Mischief theatre the result is a kind of determined foray into the realm of the comedy of mistaken identities. Few ideas are new here. But in director Matt DiCarlo’s production every one of them is followed through to an extreme that wears down any initial resistance to the broadness of the humour. Just give in to the slapstick silliness, and enjoy.
A Comedy about Spies
Noel Coward Theatre
★★★★
