NOISES OFF

[Deanfan5]

It is good to see this 1982 farce reprised at the Old Vic. It is a sure money spinner and the best flip one can give to post Christmas and New Year blues. Noises Off is of course a play within a play. A touring company touring a show they are not particularly fond of around towns they detest or have never heard of. The play is a sex comedy entitled 'Nothing on'. Act one is the dress rehearsal when the director is going bananas at the mistakes being made on stage. Anyway we get the gist of the story. A char lady managing a house she thinks will be empty only to be interuppted by an estate agent trying to get off with his client ( a lady tax inspector) in a house he also believes to be empty. Cue the return of the house holders who are avoiding people because of unpaid tax also believing the house to be empty. Finally a burglar with a propensity for the bottle also believing the house to be empty. This leads to a riot of misunderstandings and opening and shutting of doors and trousers at half mast. A typical farce. What we do not know when we view the action in Act 2 from backstage is that we have six bickering actors and two crew members most of whom are in muddled or supposedly secret relationships with each other which is ripe for misconstruing motives. A producer who is getting off with the prompter who is pregnant except he does not know and the tax inspector actor trying to get off with the char but suspecting one of the other actors of beating him to it. A recipe for disaster, numerous prat falls, tied shoelaces, keeping the whisky away from the actor who plays the burgler etc. Well an outright disaster. Act 3 sees the remnants of what passes for the play except everyone is emotionally or physically injured by this stage. For real belt out laughs this is a glorious farce centering as it does around plates of sardines which appear and disappear with regularity.. As one of the actors says in Act 1. 'Doors and sardines. Getting on-getting off. Getting the sardines on-getting the sardines off. That's farce. That's the theatre. That's life.' The fact that we end up with three burglars on stage such is the need for stand-ins says it all. Very well directed and acted with split second timing. Highly recommended.