Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (produced by Masquerade at the Manoel Theatre), one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, of all farces known to me, has long appealed to Anthony Bezzina, whose last production of the piece was in 2004.
As in most farces, love triangles and jealous lovers are here important and the number of doors opened and shut is en-ormous, but Frayn’s genius lies in basing his various plots and subplots on a repertory company’s rehearsals and subsequent performances of a farce within the farce, called Nothing On. The play shows how, if all the world is a stage, the performance of a theatrical piece can be greatly influenced by what is going on in the performers’ personal life.
The play is in three acts, performed here with just one interval. In the first act, Lloyd (Stephen Oliver) is finding it near impossible to conduct a dress rehearsal of Nothing On. The weaknesses of individual members of the cast are com-pounded by the amorous intrigues of some performers in real life. Lloyd himself is having separate affairs with his leading lady, Brooke (Jo Caruana) and with his assistant stage manager Poppy (Tina Rizzo). His leading man Gary (Alan Paris) is carrying on with Dotty, the actress who is financing the production and playing Mrs Clackett, the comic char in the production.
By the end of the act, a furious Lloyd has alienated the attrac-tive but theatrically-inexperienced Brooke and this, together with Gary’s mounting jealousy over Dotty’s budding interest in the depressed Freddy (Stefan Farrugia), another cast member, leads to the brilliantly-written second act.
In this act, the play within the play is being performed some weeks later, with the real audience having a backstage view of the proceedings. In this incredibly hilarious act Gary and Dotty are much keener on hitting out unpleasantly at each other than on their stage performance, resorting to puerile acts such as tying shoe-aces together so as to trip the other up or Gary’s threatening to attack Freddy with a fireman’s axe.
Lloyd’s desperate attempts to win back Brooke are scuppered by a stunning revelation at the act’s end.
As in most farces, love triangles and jealous lovers are here important
In the third act, showing a performance a month later, the production (viewed front-stage as in act one) has become so shambolic that Freddy, still in an emotional state, has to be prompted openly onstage to say important lines, while the inexperienced Brooke, ignoring the fact that the whole production is in constant change, refuses to adapt her lines to the new reality.
A comic climax is reached when the role of a burglar played by the elderly and alcoholic Selsdon (Victor Debono) who is considered perfectly unreliable becomes a trio of burglars as two stand-ins also come in at short intervals, all of them saying their lines in chorus.
I suspect that Bezzina’s direction, though admirable in many ways, rarely reaches the slick-ness and controlled frenzy of his previous production. The action is incredibly intricate and on occasion gets the viewer confused, but no laugh lines are lost and the characterisation even of a secondary role – that of the stage-manager Tim (Thomas Camilleri) – is always sharp.
Stephen Oliver is an outstand-ing Lloyd, trying hard to avoid exploding, but sometimes disastrously failing to do so and a selfish two-timing lover who deserves all he gets. Polly March makes the hilarious most of her Dotty, rising to comic heights in act two and cleverly hinting at a concealed sadness in the last act.
Paris gives Gary, basically a two-dimensional figure, some sub-stance in his delivery of the character’s mannered and often incomplete statements when not speaking as a character in the farce, and as the character he establishes himself as one of the reliable performers.
His jealous attachment to Dotty gradually shows itself and, in act two he becomes a farcical Othello in his behaviour towards both Dotty and his presumed rival Freddy.
Jo Caruana’s squeaky dumb blonde voice complemented her slender shapeliness in the various scenes where she wears just underwear. She brought out Brook’s great deficiencies as an actress, but also her formidable strength as a badly jilted woman.
Of the other characters, Victor Debono did not impress me as the old character actor with traditional mannerisms he is meant to be. But I liked Daphne Said’s Belinda, who never loses her head in a crisis and is drawn to Farrugia’s Freddy, a character who remains purely two-dimensional.