Brilliant in parts: you may need oxygen

NOISES OFF, Lowry, Salford to Saturday
Michael Frayn has had a chequered playwriting career: alongside pension-boosting shows like this one, “Copenhagen”, “Benefactors” and “Alphabetical Order” has gone a string of rarely-performed plays.

Did you know he wrote a follow-up of sorts to this comedy, which features audiences in the way this one features actors and backstage staff?

It helps to show that Frayn’s funniest work isn’t born of a love of theatre (in fact he says he hated theatre until he was in his late thirties) but of smartness: anyone could have told him that actors and acting are inherently funny, but audiences aren’t.

In some ways it’s the same with this supreme farce about a farce: though one of the funniest stage shows ever created, there are times — and especially in much of the problematical third act — when the humour dissipates because the characters have lost the plot, and what they are doing is silly, but not so funny.

This has little to do with the performers, who are to a man and woman an exemplary bunch in the Old Vic’s first West End transfer and hit touring show.

For those who haven’t seen it, act one gives us a low-rent touring company in final rehearsal for a bad farce. In act two we see the show a month later but from behind the set, where the chaos of a company falling apart is all too evident. The third act shows the same first act yet again, this time out front again on the last date of the tour, when all semblance of keeping it together has been lost.

It’s a brilliant premise handled with extraordinary skill and theatre in-jokery, with the almost wordless second act rightly held up as one of the funniest ever — though, as here in Lindsay Posner’s production, it can seem slightly clinical.

The cast is very strong, from Neil Pearson as the director to Thomasin Rand as the sex-fodder glamour girl Brooke. As always the hardest working performers are David Bark-Jones and Chris Larkin as leading men Garry and Freddie, who indulge in one of the funniest bits of business I’ve seen in the show: furious Garry chases Freddie, but his shoelaces are tied together and Freddie’s trousers are round his ankles and they move at the speed of a crippled slug. One of so many laughs in the act, you might need oxygen.