Word: frayne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...they may appear to be fleeing tear gas or a smoke bomb, these people are in fact the happy victims of a very different kind of explosion. They have just spent more than two hours howling and guffawing at Noises Off, the farce by Britain's Michael Frayn that is the comedy hit of the season. The show recounts the misadventures of a troupe of fifth-rate actors as they perform a sex farce titled Nothing On during a fleabag provincial tour. The plot of Nothing On involves a ditzy maid in an English country house, a wayward plate...
...theater parlance, noises off refers to commotion in the wings. In Frayn's play, the noises off are the backstage yelps and battle cries of the actors, who are entangled in a sex farce of their own. Frayn's most novel stroke is to set his second act behind the scenes at a performance of Nothing On. While the players on the far side of the scenery invisibly sing out their lines, those on the near side conduct a frenzied pantomime with a wine bottle, a cactus plant, bouquets of flowers, a fireman's ax, shoelaces tied...
...idea for Noises occurred to Frayn, 50, a well-known British farceur and satirist, one night in 1970 as he stood in the wings of a London theater watching a performance of a quick-change, arms-flapping farce he had written for Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briers. "It was funnier from behind than in front," recalls Frayn, "and I thought, 'One day I must write a farce from behind...
When he finally got around to it, the play cost him a year of agonizing effort. "I didn't know if actors would even be able to perform it," says Frayn. "If I could have thought of a way to write a program for the second act, I would have learned to use a computer. Instead, I just had to try to remember where all nine actors and all the characters in Nothing On were at every moment. I often felt that I had come to the end of the bytes in my brain, that I had exceeded...
When he could fiddle with it no more, Frayn sent a copy of Noises Off" to his friend Michael Blakemore...