Viewing a Farce from Behind

By Denise Worell

The comedy hit Noises Off is a triumph of slapstick choreography

Each night at 10:45, crowds stream out of Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theater limp and disheveled, gasping for breath and wiping their eyes. Much as they may appear to be fleeing tear gas or a smoke bomb, these people are in fact the happy victims of a very different kind of explosion. They have just spent more than two hours howling and guffawing at Noises Off, the farce by Britain's Michael Frayn that is the comedy hit of the season. The show recounts the misadventures of a troupe of fifth-rate actors as they perform a sex farce titled Nothing On during a fleabag provincial tour. The plot of Nothing On involves a ditzy maid in an English country house, a wayward plate of sardines, an illicit couple, a licit couple dodging the taxman, a sheik and a bibulous burglar. Doors slam (the set contains seven of them) and trousers drop with dizzying abandon.

In theater parlance, noises off refers to commotion in the wings. In Frayn's play, the noises off are the backstage yelps and battle cries of the actors, who are entangled in a sex farce of their own. Frayn's most novel stroke is to set his second act behind the scenes at a performance of Nothing On. While the players on the far side of the scenery invisibly sing out their lines, those on the near side conduct a frenzied pantomime with a wine bottle, a cactus plant, bouquets of flowers, a fireman's ax, shoelaces tied together and assorted other slapstick paraphernalia. It is a pas de neufso ingeniously choreographed that the antics in the back-to-back farces coincide precisely, while lines of dialogue interlock in midair.

The idea for Noises occurred to Frayn, 50, a well-known British farceur and satirist, one night in 1970 as he stood in the wings of a London theater watching a performance of a quick-change, arms-flapping farce he had written for Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briers. "It was funnier from behind than in front," recalls Frayn, "and I thought, 'One day I must write a farce from behind.' "

When he finally got around to it, the play cost him a year of agonizing effort. "I didn't know if actors would even be able to perform it," says Frayn. "If I could have thought of a way to write a program for the second act, I would have learned to use a computer. Instead, I just had to try to remember where all nine actors and all the characters in Nothing On were at every moment. I often felt that I had come to the end of the bytes in my brain, that I had exceeded the capacity of my memory store."

When he could fiddle with it no more, Frayn sent a copy of Noises Off" to his friend Michael Blakemore, an

Australian-born director who had staged Frayn's 1980 comedy Make and Break as well as several notable productions at Britain's National Theater. Blakemore came up with such good suggestions for staging that Frayn rewrote most of the play. It worked. Noises Off opened sensationally in London two years ago and has been playing to packed houses ever since.

The physically demanding farce, however, has already exhausted two sets of actors and is currently wearing down a third. Blakemore rehearsed two of the three London casts and so was well prepared when he arrived in New York to train the Broadway team for a December opening: he brought his whistle. Says he:

"Once the rehearsal for the second act gets started, there is terrific noise on one side of the backdrop and tremendous physical energy on the other. It is like a motor car out of control and very hard to bring to a stop, so I have to use a whistle."

The Broadway players were suitably daunted by the exacting precision of Blakemore's instructions and Frayn's stage directions (the script for the second act has two columns to describe the simultaneous goings-on of the two farces). Says Actress Deborah Rush, who plays a spaced-out tax auditor in Nothing On: 'They knew just how many breaths were required between the opening and closing of a door." Brian Murray, the beleaguered director of Nothing On, recalls that just before rehearsals began, "Michael Blakemore called us together and told us that in two weeks we'd wish we were dead."

In the second act, the play-within-a-play is like a metronome. Says Paxton Whitehead, who plays the dithery tax dodger of Nothing On: "Everything in the front of the set is timed to the voices in the back. We always have to have the third ear out."

Murray recalls one occasion when Victor Garber, portraying a lecherous real estate agent in Nothing On, inadvertently placed the prop wine bottle two inches away from its appointed spot: "This meant that Douglas Scale [the pixilated burglar] couldn't reach it. Doug brushed it, knocked it over. I reached for it, fumbled it and dropped it between us. We're talking a couple of inches, but that's crucial. The audience is suspended on a tightrope with us. If we stop, they lose their involvement."

The comic havoc of Noises Off means peril at every step for the actors. Says Garber, who somersaults down a flight of stairs into a pratfall every night: "I still say a little prayer each time I begin."

Dorothy Loudon, the maid in Nothing On, has lost 25 Ibs., suffered two broken toes and two bruised ribs, and has a trachea infection from the strain on her voice. "I'm so black and blue I haven't worn a dress for weeks," she says.

Linda Thorson, whose Nothing On role is the tax dodger's wife, has lost 10 Ibs. Virtually all the cast have cuts, bruises or splinters to show for their pains, and Seale, 70, has developed bursitis in his knee. Whitehead sums up the experience by telling the story of a man who went to visit Edmund Gwenn as the vintage actor languished on his deathbed. "It must be hard, very hard, Ed," the friend offered. "It is," Gwenn replied. "But not as hard as farce." And not nearly as funny. --ByDenise Worrell.

Reported by Elaine Dutka

With reporting by Elaine Dutka