A farce is built on everything going awry. Because the audience knows, to a certain extent what is coming—slamming doors, falling scenery, people pratfalling—the funniest farces often find a way to escalate the mishaps, milking laughs through a willingness to push past expectations to a sort of delirious, even existential, silliness. The quintessential example of this comes not from the theater, but from The Simpsons, which takes the age-old stepping on a rake gag so far beyond what should be funny that it becomes sublime.
The British import, The Play That Goes Wrong, now at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, gets much of this right. Created by England’s Mischief Theatre, The Play That Goes Wrong is not as complete a play in terms of creating actual people as Michael Frayn’s classic Noises Off, which was revived on Broadway just last year. As a result, it relies a bit more on cheap laughs than character-based humor that can generate deeper, longer and more satisfying laughs. Still, that’s surely an unfair comparison, like criticizing a new drama for not being as good as Hamlet. Despite its few missteps, anyone who enjoys farce will be smiling, chuckling or laughing the entire evening. (Anyone who finds such slapstick tiresome should know to stay away).
The show, about a disastrous night for an imaginary amateur theatre troupe—The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society—putting on a what proves to be a terrible play, starts going for laughs before the first line is even delivered: there’s a fake playbill within the actual Playbill, featuring a Who’s Who of the troupe’s cast, a note from the company’s president—who is also the play’s director and the play’s star—and even a fake ad. Meanwhile, there’s some pre-show bits on stage as the stage manager and light/sound operator desperately and unsuccessfully try to fix the poorly designed set.
The show formally opens with the director/star, Chris Bean, introducing himself, the troupe and the play, The Murder at Haversham Manor; he’s a nervous and apologetic man and Henry Shields (who co-wrote the play with co-stars Henry Lewis and Jonathan Sayer) conveys this in a way reminiscent of Michael Palin’s many put-upon characters in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. However, during the show itself, Bean plays Inspector Carter, called to investigate the titular murder. As the set crumbles, the wrong props appear—with paint thinner quite painfully standing in for a fake glass of scotch—and one character after another is knocked unconscious, Shields brilliantly channels John Cleese’s perpetually aggrieved Basil Fawlty, generating some of the show’s funniest moments.
Not all the choices are so inspired. The playwrights note that the title makes clear that this is about a play that goes wrong, not one that is done badly and further state that the actors in the play “are not bad actors but the victims of unfortunate circumstance.” While Shield’s Bean fits that description, the cast is filled with bad actors. Dave Hearn is charming as Max, the novice who sells out at the first taste of audience applause, making his gestures increasingly flamboyant and stopping to take bows mid-scene (although this wears a bit thin by the end). But Charlie Russell plays Sandra, who plays Florence the fiance of the murder victim, so broadly that it comes across as a ham-handed parody of community theater that parodies her own intentions… and thus is a distraction. It’s a relief when Sandra is knocked unconscious and replaced by Annie, the stage manager, carrying a script. At the press performance, Annie was winningly played by understudy Bryony Corrigan, who goes from tentative to enthusiastic without losing her character’s essence. (Annie is eventually knocked out as well, to be replaced as Florence by a reluctant Trevor, the light and sound operator, and, after he is flattened by falling scenery, a grandfather clock becomes a stand-in for the fiance.)