Noises Off Playguide

One of the most difficult assignments for someone writing about theatre is to describe a farce. Actually writing a farce must be nearly impossible. So how does one describe Michael Frayn's Noises Off? Perhaps one of his characters--the director of Nothing On, the play-within-the-play, says it most economically: "Doors and sardines. . .that's farce, that's theatre, that's life."

In truth, Noises Off is about a bit more that that. It's about 7 slamming doors, 1 breaking window, 10 trips up and down stairs, 17 false entrances, 73 flubbed lines, 46 miscues, 1 dramatic highlight, 22 double entendres, 6 regular entendres and a million laughs--and several plates of sardines.

The critic Frank Rich called Noises Off the funniest play written in his lifetime. But the he called the film version one of the worst movies he had ever seen--which reinforces that earlier quote from the besieged director: it IS theatre, and it has to be seen on stage to be fully enjoyed.

Audiences are so likely to love Noises Off that it's not difficult to imagine them calling on the producers for more plays by Frayn. They should be forewarned, however, that Noises Off is something of an anomaly in the Frayn canon. He has written other, less well-known farces. Noises Off actually had its origin when Frayn was watching one of these, Chinamen, from backstage, and it occurred to him that seeing it from that perspective was even funnier than seeing it out front.

Yet most of Frayn's theatre work, and indeed most of his novels and work in various other genres, are of a far more serious persuasion, as perhaps befits a man who studied philosophy at Cambridge. His subjects are incredibly diverse, and the encyclopedic knowledge he possesses in so many areas is quite astonishing.

His play Benefactors, for example, concerns two young neighboring couples. The husbands are respectively a visionary architect with a strong social conscience and a destructive journalist. The interplay between the two is, according to Rich, "a bleak, icy, macrocosmic exploration of such serious matters as the nature of good and evil, the price of political and psychological change, and the relationship of individuals to the state."

Frayn's 1998 drama, Copenhagen, which won the Tony Award for Best Play, is concerned with the somber topic of a 1941 meeting between two physicists--the German Werner Heisenberg and the Danish and half-Jewish Niels Bohr, in which the pair discuss the moral implications of scientists working on nuclear weaponry. The play seems to attempt an application of the uncertainty principle to human motivations, intentions and personalities at the intersection of science and politics.

In 2005 the playwright's drama, Democracy, appeared. This work dealt with the symbiotic relationship between the German Chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Willy Brandt and the East German spy Gunter Guillaume, who brought about Brandt's downfall. In the words of John Simon, the play depicted "a tragicomic lament for the parliamentary democracy it views as a utopian ideal, and also an elegy for one of its humanly imperfect champions."

Of Frayn's many novels, a few are available at the Lancaster library, and are well worth checking out, though these also will provide more food for thought than uproarious hilarity. Spies is a coming of age tale about the adventures of two boys in wartime London. The more imaginative leader of the two tosses out the idea that his mother is a German spy, and as the boys investigate this unlikely possibility they reveal a number of secrets, with tragic consequences to adults. Headlong deals with a British academic who believes he has discovered an unknown painting by Breugel in the collection of his boorish, art-ignorant neighbor, who uses the painting to block a fireplace. Along with his comic misadventures in trying to relieve his neighbor of the painting, we also get a detailed religious history of 15th century Holland, and lessons in the complex iconography and iconology of Netherlandish painting.

Frayn's broad knowledge of so many diverse subjects, and his ability to convey that knowledge in entertaining and diverse literary forms, led to his being awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by London's Brunel University, which proclaimed him a "Renaissance Man." The citation reads:

"Michael Frayn is a true Renaissance man of the twenty-first century: journalist and reporter, newspaper columnist, translator, documentary maker, philosopher, opera librettist, screenplay writer, award-winning playwright, and prize-winning novelist. The quality and diversity of his output demonstrate a wide-ranging and penetrating literary imagination and intelligence. Even more distinctively he has that unusual creative ability we associate with the best writers, like Dickens, to speak persuasively to the widest possible audience. From the hit farce Noises Off, to the blackly humorous revelation of academic inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness in the novel Headlong, from his imaginative reconstruction of the relationship of two nuclear physicists in the play Copenhagen, to his novel Spies, with it's child's eye view of the secrets of war and adult life, Michael Frayn's work touches us all, with its sparkling wit and deep insights into human aspiration and follies. In his own words, literary narratives can be classified by two 'fundamental categories--they are all hits or flops.' His narratives of human relationships and obsessions uncover the 'hits and flops' of everyone's personal story, with a satiric wit and benign empathy."

Happily we do not need Mr. Frayn's intellect and insight to enjoy Noises Off. But the play is not so much an anomaly as it at first might seem, for it too deals with characters who are attempting to be something or achieve something that is beyond their grasp, a theme that reechoes through all the writer's works. Only on this occasion, they are trying to do so within the context of a silly sex farce. All we have to understand is slamming doors. And sardines.