NOISES OFF
The Sound You Hear is Laughter
by Elaine Liner
Call a play a farce and it damn well better be funny. Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is far and away the farciest of all modern farces. Full of slamming doors, sexy girls, mistaken identities and stray plates of sardines, Noises Off has been setting the standard for feather-light theatrical comedy for three decades now. …
Laughs, big ones, belly-crunching, thigh-slapping, gasp-for-oxygen laughs, are what you want from a farce. You’ll get the giggles, guaranteed, at Theatre Arlington’s whizbang Noises Off, directed by Andy Baldwin, star of many of Circle Theatre’s broad comedies over the past few seasons.
Frayn’s brilliant play is a paean to stage props and crack comic timing. With characters running up and down stairs, bobbing out of doors and windows like cuckoos out of clocks and intentionally tumbling over couches, tables and their own dropped trousers, any slip-ups could be dangerous. The play then shows what happens when all goes wrong.
The first act of Noises Off finds a ninth-rate company of players in the final moments of a prolonged dress rehearsal for a typical British sex comedy called Nothing On. Their director (played by the delightfully wry and rumpled Ben Phillips) is at the end of his tether. If he can put Nothing On on, he’s off to direct Richard III. But first he has to get over the hump of a bad play and the bad actors in it.
Doors and sardines: Mikaela Krantz, Shane Beeson, Brad Stephens and Sherry Hopkins star in Theatre Arlington's NOISES OFF through January 29 at Theatre Arlington. Call 817-275-7661.
In the second act, we see what happens backstage as the six performers in Nothing On try to act comedy out front while keeping an ongoing feud between cast members from erupting into violence behind the curtain. (Jack Hardaway’s two-story scenery at Theatre Arlington turns its back on the audience for this part.) For the third short act, the Nothing On bunch, turned around to face us again, is winding up their long road tour, with cues blown, relationships soured and the play-within-the-play reduced to a shambles.
It has to move at a breathless pace to achieve maximum farce-ity, and Baldwin keeps his cast jumping like the stage is on fire. Shane Beeson makes some hilariously swift moves as the dim-bulb male ingénue, Gary Lejeune, who speaks in incomplete sentences and, like, well … you know. Like that. Playing the dim bim opposite him is Mikaela Krantz, built like a beautiful, pale stick insect and, costumed in tiny triangles of green lingerie, the funniest undressed actress of the year so far.
All the others — Krista Scott as the actress playing the sardine-juggling maid, Sherry Hopkins as the gossipy leading lady, Brad Stephens as a method actor given to nosebleeds under stress, Michael James as the dipsomaniacal old Shakespearean, Robin Daniel as the crazed stage manager and Eric Dobbins as the sleep-deprived stagehand — are the top of the tip of comedy goodness. (Their mispronunciation of the English town “Basingstoke” is a tiny but fixable flaw. It should take the long “A.”)
Other productions of Noises Off around here have suffered from size problems. Too often they were spread across a big stage (like the one at WaterTower Theatre), which ruins the tight timing needed for comedy choreography. Theatre Arlington’s small-ish space fits the play to a farthing, putting the audience close enough to catch all the subtle tosses of props and angry looks in the pantomime-heavy second act, but far enough away to take in the whole picture.
Frayn, hailed as the master of English farce after Noises Off premiered in 1982, would go on to write more brilliant plays; one about physicists, Copenhagen, and then the drama Democracy, about German chancellor Willy Brandt. But it’s this comedy that’s performed most often. Hardly a season goes by without a production of it in a Dallas or Fort Worth theater, and it’s a rare treat to see it done as well as they’re doing it in Arlington.
Noises Off is so efficient and smart, commenting on the silliness of British sex-coms but showing how hard it is to do one. It’s all so complicated, says Noises Off character Gary Lejeune: “We’ve got bags. We’ve got boxes. Plus doors. Plus words.”
Giving Frayn his due, let’s move words to the top of that list.
Related articles
- Behind Dressing Room Doors (bradstephens.wordpress.com)
- Star-Telegram Review: NOISES OFF (bradstephens.wordpress.com)
- Theater Jones Review: NOISES OFF (bradstephens.wordpress.com)
- Column Review: NOISES OFF (bradstephens.wordpress.com)
- A Joyful Noise: On & Off @ Theatre Arlington (bradstephens.wordpress.com)
Brad Stephens 