Description
Noises Off is not one play but two - simultaneously a traditional sex farce, Nothing On, and the backstage farce that develops during Nothing On's final rehearsal and tour. The two farces begin to interlock, as the characters make their exits from Nothing On only to find themselves making entrances into the even worse nightmare going on backstage, and exit from that only to make their entrances back into Nothing On. In the end, at the disastrous final performance in Stockton-on-Tees, the two farces can be kept separate no longer, and coalesce into one single collective nervous breakdown.
Noises Off won both the Evening Standard and the Olivier Awards for Best Comedy when it was first produced, and ran in the West End for nearly five years. Michael Frayn's most recent play, Copenhagen, won both the Evening Standard Best Play Award in London and the Tony Best Play Award in New York.
This play opens with a touring company dress-rehearsing "Nothing On", a conventional farce. Mixing mockery and homage, Frayn heaps into this play a stock of characters and situation
About the Author
Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. He has written seventeen plays, including Noises Off, Copenhagen, and Democracy, translated Chekhov's last four plays, and adapted his first as Wild Honey. His screenplays include Clockwise, starring John Cleese, and among his eleven novels are The Tin Men, Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, Spies, and Skios. Collections of articles include Collected Columns, Stage Directions, and Travels with a Typewriter. He has also published two philosophical works, Constructions and The Human Touch, and a memoir, My Father's Fortune. His most recent publications are three collections of short entertainments, Matchbox Theatre, Pocket Playhouse, and Magic Mobile. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.
Reviews
'Frayn's construct is based on the principle that if farce involves watching the wheels come off a well-oiled machine, then nothing could be funnier than seeing the wheels fall off a farce itself... Pure comedy gold.' * Alfred Hickling, Guardian, 26.2.09 *
'Michael Frayn's deleriously funny comedy about actors in crisis is probably being produced somewhere in the world every week of the year.' * Jeremy Kingston, The Times, 21.05.10 *
'Another of Frayn's regular motifs surfaces here, the mayhem that results when precise order breaks down.' * Jeremy Kingston, The Times, 21.05.10 *
'Is Michael Frayn's farce about a farce the funniest play ever commited to paper? It would certainly be in my top 3.' * Robert Dawson Scott, The Times, 22.06.10 *
'You have to hand it to Michael Frayn. He is nothing if not electric. It is scarcely beleivable that he is the author of Copenhagen (a deeply philisophical play about the politics of science) and this most famous of modern English farces, Noises off.' * Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, 13.06.10 *
As finely worked as a Swiss watch and as funny as the human condition permits..the zigzag brilliance of the text as the clunky lines of the farce-within-a-farce rub against the sharp dialogue of reality. -- Michael Billington * Guardian *
Genius farce..achingly, foot-stompingly, seal-honkingly hysterical.
Frayn has written more serious plays but none more profound.
Only Noises Off captures the baffling resilience of human existence.
A spot on parody..achieves an almost mathematical elegance as Frayn calculates all the many and varied ways in which it can all go wrong.
Noises Off is cunningly structured.
..Noises Off offers an infallible escape in to happiness.
Michael Frayn's play feels fresh, witty and polished.
It is a triptych that illuminates the fragility of drama and the relationships of those who create it.
It is entertaining and painful - a summation of all that farce can do.
There has never been a more brilliantly conceived machine for helpless laughter than Michael Frayn's 1982 classic Noises Off..
..deliriously funny..
Many claims have been made for Michael Frayn's award-winning Noises Off, including that it's the funniest play ever written.
The skilfull structure of the piece means the performance builds and builds..
It's comic bliss. -- Georgina Brown * Mail on Sunday *
A brilliant farce set behind the scenes of a dreadful one..a richly detailed tapestry of catastrophe. -- Andrzej Lukowski * Time Out London *
Frank Rich loved it, 'Noises Off', said the great N'Yawk critic, 'is, was and always will be the funniest play written in my lifetime'.
Frayn's orchestration of his materials is dazzlingly skillful.
Imagine a comedy so definitively comic that there seemed no point in ever writing another.
I cannot think of another play which has quite so obviously been written by a comic genius.
..a jaw-droppingly clever piece of work.
remains a laughter-generating machine * Stage *
Michael Frayn's first-rate farce about a farce follows a second-rate troupe stating a third-rate British sex comedy . . . widely thought . . . to be the funniest play every written . . . It is, to put it academically, a metafarce - a farce about a farce - into which Mr. Frayn has inserted a near-literal turn of the dramatic screw whose ingenuity borders on genius . . . To say that nothing goes right for them is to understate the case by a factor of . . . oh, ten thousand. [...] flawless. If laughter is the best medicine, then 'Noises Off' is surely capable at the very least of curing double pneumonia. * Wall Street Journal *
a classic farce and a fiendishly ingenious homage to the form . . . raucously delightful * New York Times *
this kind of comedic brilliance never gets stale. * Variety *
not just one of the funniest plays ever written but one of the best. * Vulture *
Book Information
ISBN 9781474261173
Author Michael Frayn
Format Hardback
Page Count 176
Imprint Methuen Drama
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Weight(grams) 354g
