McGuire Proscenium Stage / Oct 27 – Dec 16, 2018 Noises Off by MICHAEL FRAYN directed by MEREDITH McDONOUGH PLAY GUIDE Inside THE PLAY Synopsis, Setting and Characters • 4 How Noises Off Came To Be • 5 Responses to Noises Off • 6 THE PLAYWRIGHT About Michael Frayn • 8 Michael Frayn: In His Own Words • 9 CULTURAL CONTEXT The Nothing On Tour • 11 Britishisms, Theater Terms and Other References in Noises Off • 12 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION For Further Reading and Understanding • 14 Play guides are made possible by Guthrie Theater Play Guide Copyright 2018 DRAMATURG Carla Steen GRAPHIC DESIGNER Akemi Graves CONTRIBUTOR Carla Steen Guthrie Theater, 818 South 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55415 All rights reserved. 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The Minnesota State Arts Board received additional funds to support this activity from common humanity. the National Endowment for the Arts. 2 \ GUTHRIE THEATER PHOTO: SALLY WINGERT, REMY AUBERJONOIS, JOHNNY WU AND LAURA JORDAN IN NOISES OFF (DAN NORMAN) "That's what it's all about. Doors and sardines. Getting on — getting off. Getting the sardines on — getting the sardines off. That's farce. That's the theatre. That's life." – Lloyd to the cast in Noises Off About This Guide This play guide is designed to fuel up on a play before you see it your curiosity and deepen your onstage. Or perhaps you’re a fellow DIG DEEPER understanding of a show’s history, theater company doing research If you are a theater meaning and cultural relevance for an upcoming production. company and would like so you can make the most of your We’re glad you found your way more information about theatergoing experience. You might here, and we encourage you to this production, contact be reading this because you fell in dig in and mine the depths of this Dramaturg Carla Steen at love with a show you saw at the extraordinary story. [email protected]. Guthrie. Maybe you want to read GUTHRIE THEATER \ 3 THE PLAY SETTING ACT ONE: The Grand Theatre in Weston-super-Mare on Monday, January 14. ACT TWO: The Theatre Royal in Ashton-under-Lyne on Wednesday, February 13. ACT THREE: The Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees on Saturday, April 6. In all three acts, the action of Nothing On takes place in the living room of the Brents’ country home on a Wednesday afternoon. CHARACTERS Lloyd Dallas, the director of Nothing On Tim Allgood, the stage manager/understudy for Nothing On Poppy Norton-Taylor, the assistant stage manager/ understudy for Nothing On PHOTO: LAURA JORDAN AND JOHNNY WU IN NOISES OFF (DAN NORMAN) Dotty Otley, a seasoned actress playing housekeeper Synopsis Mrs. Clackett in Nothing On Garry Lejeune, a comic During a dress rehearsal for the bedroom farce Nothing On by Robin leading man playing Roger Housemonger, director Lloyd Dallas tries to keep his theater troupe on Tramplemain in Nothing On task so the play can open on time and launch its tour through the British provinces. Dotty can’t remember her lines or her props, stage manager Brooke Ashton, an ingenue Tim attends to doors that won’t open or close, Brooke loses her contacts playing Vicki in Nothing On and Garry loses his cool. Despite countless setbacks and through sheer perseverance, the troupe makes it through the first act mostly unscathed. Frederick Fellowes, a fading But there’s no telling what will happen when the tour begins. leading man who plays Philip Brent and the Sheikh in Nothing On A month later, strained nerves and dropped lines are a quaint memory. Actors are nowhere to be found or threaten to quit, and backstage Belinda Blair, a cast-mother type squabbles spill onstage while a whisky bottle and bouquet of flowers keep playing Flavia Brent in Nothing On ending up in the wrong hands. By the end of the tour, all hell has broken loose as the troupe stumbles through a disaster of a performance that Selsdon Mowbray, a character makes “the show must go on” a debatable adage. actor playing the Burglar in Nothing On 4 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAY How Noises Off Came To Be It was his backstage comedy wrote it on a heavy old German There were amendments, though, Noises Off in 1982 that cemented Adler typewriter, and every time I with every new cast and transfers Frayn’s reputation, but the play’s did a rewrite I would have to type to the Savoy, Washington, D.C. and gestation was long and painful. The out another slip of paper and New York. When Jeremy Sams notion came from watching [Lynn] glue or clip it to the script.” … directed the NT’s 2000 revival, he Redgrave and [Richard] Briers agreed that it needed changes. “By from the wings in 1970 in a frenzy It is perhaps the play that he then it was difficult to persuade the of costume changes in … The Two has rewritten the most over the audience to go out for a second of Us. He presented it as a one-act decades, with continual revisions interval, so we put in a front cloth play, Exits, for a charity evening through previews at the Lyric scene between Acts II and III to in 1977. Hammersmith. “Halfway through cover the set change.” Act III it turned into a serious play “I rarely take commissions, but and people began to speculate on Excerpted from “The Big Interview: Michael Codron, who has produced the events of the evening and what Michael Frayn” by Moira Petty, The Stage, most of my plays, asked if I could it told us about the nature of life. It May 10, 2015 do it as a full-length play. It really became clear at that stage that no needed reorganising, so I took the one wanted to hear about that, so I commission but said I couldn’t do it then had to rewrite the end of Act at that moment." … I. This went on until Nicky Hanson, playing Garry, was deputed by It was a complicated play to devise, the cast — rather like Garry in the as the characters — actors in a play — to say they weren’t going to farce — have to be seen both on learn any more versions before and offstage, and the relationship press night.” between the two developed. “I PHOTO: LAURA JORDAN, SALLY WINGERT, NATHAN KEEPERS, REMY AUBERJONOIS AND JOHNNY WU IN NOISES OFF (DAN NORMAN) GUTHRIE THEATER \ 5 THE PLAY Responses to Noises Off PHOTO: NATHAN KEEPERS, SALLY WINGERT AND LAURA JORDAN IN NOISES OFF (DAN NORMAN) One of the great pleasures of Off' are very brilliant caricatures Imagine the rising hysteria of the “Noises Off” is the sheer ingenuity — very recognizable, very true, tragedian who, having forgotten of its craftsmanship: Mr. Frayn and quite thin. The energy derives the sword for his big suicide scene, works out the interlocking from the situations. That is why opted to kick himself in the shin, yell mathematical equation of two a farce often has a quiet first act. “the boot was poisoned,” and die. farcical narratives even as he keeps In 'Noises Off,' it’s at least quieter … Well, you’ve imagined something his witty lines flying high. It’s the than the other two acts. That’s similar to Michael Frayn’s “Noises kind of bravura skill one associates because it takes time to lay down Off,” which is at once an evocation, with such other British playwrights the explanatory material that will an interpretation, and a rebirth of as Tom Stoppard and Alan produce situational crises later.” that atavistic form, knockabout Ayckbourn at peak form. farce. Michael Blakemore, the first director of Frank Rich, “Theater: ‘Noises Off’ and Other Noises Off, quoted in “Precision That Makes Act I is the evocation. A British London Comedies,” The New York Times, Chaos Funny” by Nan Roberts, The New York touring company is rehearsing June 16, 1982 Times, December 16, 1983 “Nothing On,” a kind of farce still sometimes to be found on unsophisticated stages in England, Asked to define the difference There are situations which can complete with disappearing dresses, between other forms of comedy provoke terror and yet keep terror falling trousers, awful puns and and farce, Mr. Blakemore said: safely in the realm of hilarity. sexual innuendo. We’re shown how “Farce depends on situations, on Imagine, for instance the feelings [great French farce writer Georges] events. Comedy depends more of the actor who can’t open a door Feydeau has been debased by on recognizable behavior and on and is obliged, as one I know was, his bastard cousins, introduced to character. The people in 'Noises to exit through a cardboard wall. the performers perpetuating such 6 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAY atrocities, and, perhaps, lured into Worry not about that seismic sound and affection in his fictional laughing at their frantic attempt to coming from the Brooks Atkinson construct, Nothing On.