Michael Frayn’s Noises Off is one of the great modern farces in the English language, having been enormously successful since its initial seasons in the 1980s. Being set in a larger-than- life theatrical world of make-believe, the medium of farce has both a resonance and a truth.  Witty, sharply observed and brilliantly written, this delightful play-within-a-play imagines Nothing On, a truly bad piece of theatre in three stages of its life. Act 1 is the final and disastrous dress rehearsal. Act 2 is the play observed from back stage on tour some 4 weeks later, while Act 3 is near the end of the play’s 10 week run, when relationships between the cast, crew and director have totally disintegrated.

Noises Off is a quintessential British play set in the post-war era where weekly repertory theatre, often using poorly written plays that were superficially rehearsed with second-rate actors, was common-place. Frayn was making clear observations here about the theatre he grew up in, as well as using the medium of farce with its emphasis on confusion (including sexual liaisons, lost trousers, doors sticking, falling down stairs and bumping into furniture) to show how life imitates art and vice-versa.