Fantastic comic romp
By Anum Pasha
When I first saw Noises Off in California, it took me fifteen minutes to adjust to the cast’s fast-paced eccentricities. With all its shenanigans, exits and entrances, I wondered how tricky it must be to pull off such a heroic comic effort. “To read the script of Noises Off is to scratch your head and wonder how anyone could possibly stage the darn thing,” wrote Ben Brantley of The New York Times when he saw the play ten years ago.
But for all its frenzied activity, this classic, multiple award-winning British play by Michael Frayn has been staged for millions since it premiered in 1982. Universally admired as one of the best written farcical comedies, it was staged in Lahore last month.
There is a play within this play, which opens at a final dress rehearsal for a sexy comedy called ‘Nothing On’. The cast forgets lines, misses cues, and mishandles props, and director Lloyd Dallar (Omair Rana) is reduced to cajoling, yelling at, and pleading with them to get things right. Young girls run about on stage, old men drop their trousers and many doors open and shut continually. Among the principal actors are vanishing star Dotty Otley (Ayeshah Alam Khan), scatter brained actor Garry Long (Ian Eldred), sexy leading lady Brook Ashton (Zainab Ahmad), matinee heartthrob Freddy Dallas (Salman Naseer), another leading lady, Belinda Blair (Mina Malik), behind-the-scenes worker Poppy Taylor (Fazeelat Aslam) and alcoholic actor Selsdon Jones (Saad Masood).
By the time the first act comes to an end, the audience is well-acquainted with these characters. Dotty is supremely forgetful (and marks Khan’s comeback to theatre after a long dry spell). Garry is energetic and actually knows his lines but doesn’t express himself adequately, while ditzy Brooke, obsessed with breathing exercises, loses her contact lenses to create more havoc than ever on stage. Blair is a down-to-earth character who keeps a close eye on just about everything, and Malik’s representation of him is as brilliantly controlled as this character demands. Masood, meanwhile, has the audience falling into fits of laughter as he effortlessly executes the role of a drunkard actor.
The hour-long first act wraps up with the tension of the final night before the curtains go up, and the second act reveals that the riotous fun onstage is accompanied by equally explosive events occurring behind the scenes. For this portion the set turned around fully to expose the backstage area of ‘Nothing On’, with Production Illusions using a revolving, two-storied, seven-door stage, a novel architectural hallmark impressive for both the audience and theatre veterans.
But the weekend I happened to watch Noises Off left me slightly perturbed as well, as the hall was half empty on the fourth night of the performance. Perhaps the country was paralyzed by the overwhelming tragedy of the floods. Or, possibly, Pakistani audiences are not yet ready for farcical comedies that require two hours of viewing time.
