Leeds Grand Theatre – until 27th May 2017
I’ve been with this show, by the wonderful Mischief Theatre Company, from its beginnings above a pub with only a handful of us in the audience. I watched it grow in length and confidence and every time I see it, it only gets better and even more hilarious.
A farcical play-within-a-play, The Play That Goes Wrong charts the bungled attempt by the incompetent Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society to stage a 1920’s thriller called The Murder at Haversham Manor. Even before the play properly starts a handful of backstage “crew” desperately trying to fix props and put the finishing touches to a failing set. A poor unsuspecting member of the audience is actually pulled up to hold a shelf and a door and sweep the floor.
Everything that can possibly go wrong does. Bits keep falling off the set, so that by the end of the evening it collapses completely. The snow occasionally billowing in from outside is actually huge chunks of confetti. There’s a mishap with a stretcher so that the corpse of the first murder victim has to try sliding off stage without the audience noticing – and so on and so forth. With some of the stunts looking quite dangerous.
The Play That Goes Wrong is what it is, but it has a winning exuberant silliness and a knowing tongue-in-cheek tone. And when the fictional thespians try to extricate themselves from the pandemonium, it inevitably sows the seeds for escalating bedlam. Mischief Theatre may be predominantly known as improvisers but here the script, written by three of the original cast (Henry Lewis, Henry Shields and Jonathan Sayer), is tight and inventive enough to ensure what might have been a one-gag idea sustains the two hour show. Although the build-up is hardly subtle – it’s full-on catastrophe from the very first entrance – the team manage to ramp up the stakes without quite seeming desperate.
Such hammy slapstick relies on performance; and here it is as vigorously ribald as you could hope. In the first scenes the “corpse” of Charles Haversham (Jason Callender) refuses to lay still. The two actresses who ended up playing Florence were hilarious, Meg Mortell gave an over the top performance as the Cornley glamour puss Sandra whose diva claws come out when Stage Manager, Annie, (Katie Bernstein as a who steals the show) steps into her role as Florence Colleymore, the fiancée of the murder victim – they both endure some of the most brutal, but hilariously, physical indignities at the hands of there castmates.
Alastair Kirton is hilarious as amateur actor Max who can’t help posing and grinning at the audience while portraying the gormless Cecil Haversham, who laughs at his own jokes and clapped along with the audience when he did something impressive. Patrick Warner’s vein-popping portrayal of Chris, the actor behind the police inspector, trying desperately to hide his violent impatience at the incompetence that surrounds him is hilarious and it will be some time before I forget him pretending to make notes with a bunch of keys on a vase because his pencil and his notebook have both gone AWOL.
Edward Judge is in commanding form as Robert, an amateur actor but who sticks strictly to the script no matter what’s going on, who plays Thomas Colleymore, close friend of the murder victim. Edward Howells is a comic delight as the inexperienced Dennis, who has a particular knack of grotesquely mispronouncing even the most commonplace words, while playing the hapless butler Perkins in half-mast trousers and only the front part of his hair powdered grey, serving raw white spirit to the characters in the play because he has already mistakenly poured away the fake whisky. Completing the excellent is Graeme Rooney as Trevor, the Duran Duran-loving sound operator. The writers have produced perfect characters and how they manage to keep on acting through the show, as it literally falls down around their heads, is a joy to watch.
The production calls for a great deal of slapstick and precisely timed physical comedy from the cast, all of which is pulled off impeccably. From the intervention of director Mark Bell, who is willing to sacrifice dignity for a laugh, designers Nigel Hook (set) and Roberto Surace (costumes) capture the amateur vibe of a Mousetrap-style production perfectly, and there are many clever effects as the set gradually falls apart. The Play That Goes Wrong delivers what it promises, the constant ridiculousness produces a full on hysterical reaction to the big set-pieces, and the whole production is so funny, the laughs are so fast you barely have time to come up for air between them all, making it uproariously enjoyable.