Queensland Theatre and Melbourne Theatre Company are bringing a shamelessly entertaining farce to Brisbane audiences.
It was never going to be easy staging a bedroom farce with a mediocre cast, but pompous director Lloyd Dallas is having a red hot go. The play within a play reveals the timeline from rehearsal to performance, and shows just how hard it is to put a show together in one piece. Simon Burke, who plays Lloyd, talks about the production.
Tell us a little bit about the show itself.
It's a brilliant English farce about a English touring company putting on a very average English farce. So it's the classic "play within a play" show except you get to see the what happens in rehearsal, on stage, backstage, and a few months later when they all want to kill each other.
It's been described by some as "the funniest play ever written"… Why do you personally think this is?
I think it's the brilliance of the writing and the construction of the plot. Audiences all over the world have loved this play since it first premiered in 1982 because the playwright Michael Frayn so absolutely gets the world he's writing about. He lampoons acting and actors and directors and theatre in general so devastatingly but it's also a kind of love letter to the crazy profession we are in as well.
Can you compare this show to anything else you've ever done?
I'm actually doing a play in Sydney during our first week of rehearsals in Brisbane (a bit of a farce in itself as I am flying up and down every day!!) which was inspired partly by 'Noises Off'. It's a brand new play by Declan Greene called 'The Homosexuals' and it takes the classic formulas of classic farce and updates them to Darlinghurst Sydney 2017. Amazing to work on a brand new piece of this genre just before attempting one of the most famous examples of it.
What is a "typical English bedroom farce"?
I guess it's a silly play with a ridiculous plot with lots of saucy smutty innuendo. Kind of like the old Benny Hill or Dick Emery shows or the old 'Carry On' films but onstage. What has it been like to work with the cast and crew of this show so far? It's only week one and i'm only here until we break for lunch each day as I then fly to Sydney for my play but they are an amazing bunch of actors – every one of them had me in stitches at the first read through. And it's fantastic to finally work with Sam Strong our director – so many of my colleagues have raved about him over the years and he runs a really fun, inclusive and hard working rehearsal room.
In your opinion, what are the strengths of this production?
This play is so exact it's like it's got a degree of difficulty of ten. So it's great that Sam's assembled an Olympic team to tackle it (or at least a Commonwealth Games one). It's a 1982 play.
Are there any distinct changes in the show to make it more relevant to 2017? Or is it kept fairly similar to how it was originally shown?
It's very much of its time and I think we'll honour that.
What themes are in this show that people might relate to?
In some ways it's kind of like an office comedy so people can definitely relate to that except our office is the weird and rarified world of the theatre, so I think the similarities and differences will be very satisfying to our audience.
Why should people head along to see 'Noises Off'?
If you don't laugh yourselves sick we won't have done our job. And I promise we'll do our job.
