Theatre review: Noises Off reminds laugh-deprived audiences of what a well-oiled farce looks like
The cast members, all favourites from the Vancouver scene, make the elaborately staged chaos look easy
Actors let loose—with Swiss watch-like precision and marathon-like endurance—in Noises Off. Photo by David Cooper
Massey Theatre presents the Arts Club Theatre Company’s Noises Off until February 27
IN THE SECOND act of Noises Off, there’s no shortage of things flying through the air— a bottle of booze, a bouquet, an axe, and a potted cactus—the actors forming a kind of giant, human Rube Goldberg machine.
It’s around this time you really start to appreciate not just the mad skills of the high-calibre cast but the rarity of seeing a production that’s this elaborately orchestrated. This is the kind of stuff you may have taken for granted in the “before times”.
During the pandemic, theatre companies that didn’t go online-only had to downsize casts and stick to one-act shows that allowed for touchless “stage business”. (There was a period during COVID restrictions when every prop had to be sanitized before another cast member could touch it. Talk about farcical!) And so watching Noises Off now is like a drink of water after a drought. No, scratch that. It’s much better suited to the sloshed lot here to say it’s like a double whiskey with a tequila chaser after Dry January.
A crowd-pleasing hit since it debuted in 1982, Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is an epic, self-parodying British farce that’s a play within a play. In the now famous three-act setup, we first watch the cast run through a shaky dress rehearsal. Then, in the second act, Ted Roberts’s kitsch-tastic retro-woody set spins around to a backstage view, so that we can watch the production fall into chaos, complete with love triangles, on opening night. In a third round, the stage spins to the front view again so we can watch the opening-night antics from the audience’s perspective.
Just before the pandemic hit, Noises Off had a critically celebrated run at the Arts Club Theatre Company’s Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage—and that’s the production that now returns to the suitably storied (and spacious for social-distancing) Massey Theatre.
The returning cast members, all favourites from the Vancouver theatre scene, make the near-impossible Swiss-watch-like workings of the show look easy. With a mixed bag of U.K. accents, they bring all the characters to eccentric life. Amid the standouts, Emma Slipp’s teal-jumpsuited Belinda desperately tries to calm the chaos, even while stoking it with gossip. Andrew McNee’s slow-boil exasperation eventually threatens to blow his head right off as director Lloyd Dallas. Tess Degenstein is hilariously clued out as ingenue Brooke Adams (“Sorry?” she says every time “her thoughts are elsewhere”) and turns the simple act of losing a contact lens into an all-out master class in physical clowning. And Charlie Gallant and Kayvon Khoshkam pull off some fantastic stage business (just wait till the latter Krazy Glues his pants). Director Scott Bellis runs it all at breathless speed, nailing the slapstick and giving the actors a marathon-like workout.
It’s a rare chance to see this cast on stage together, let alone giving everything they’ve got to Frayn’s two-and-a-half hour romp. There hasn’t been this much laughter at a show since February 2020—when the Arts Club’s madcap version of Noises Off was playing the Stanley stage. And just before things became, well, very unfunny.
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