Sir Christopher Lee favours “dreaming to order” as a definition of acting, while David Warner thinks of it in terms of “pointing” – he asks the director to point him in the right direction and he takes it from there.
At its most basic level, acting requires a group of individuals to achieve mastery over their lines, faces, bodies and props. Goodness knows though, I have often seen actors lose control of all four, most notably in Too Close to the Sun, the so-bad-it-was-sublime 2009 musical about the events leading up to the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. The night I saw it, members of the cast creased up laughing after a table collapsed under the weight of its star, and – given that the prop was pivotal – it proved all but impossible to act around the calamity.
As all the television shows devoted to actors’ “bloopers” demonstrate, audiences actually rather like it when things go wrong, and, accordingly, Michael Frayn hit on a great idea with Noises Off: a show about a show that realises every actor’s nightmare.
The irony of it is, though, that with all of the front and backstage disasters timed to the second, it is very easy itself to get wrong. It is also no easy task for actors to act as actors who are having difficulties with their acting.
I saw this work done so brilliantly in a West End production in 2001, with Stephen Mangan and Lynn Redgrave, that it looked easy. It made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt.
The Old Vic’s revival, directed by Lindsay Posner, makes me wonder if it will ever be possible to pull it off again. It barely made me titter. The two-storey house in which it is set ought to be Crossroads-thin and sway every time anyone slams a door, but this one is solid. The actors – this production stars Celia Imrie and Robert Glenister – also require lightness of touch. They do not have it.
There were some members of the audience laughing hysterically on the first night, but, significantly perhaps, Frayn, sitting one seat away from me, was not among them. At its best, his play ought to be a melody of mishaps, a symphony of off-stage shenanigans, a crescendo of catastrophe.
The Old Vic’s clumsy revival feels instead like a game of ping-pong being played with a potato.
To Mar 10; www.oldvictheatre.com
This review also appears in Seven magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph
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