Farce and Michael Frayn

Farce and Michael Frayn KATHARINE WORTH "Is God?", asks Professor George Moore in Stoppard's Jumpers. "Is farce?" might be a question for today's theatre and for the same reason that bothers Moore and his wife, Dotty, in their speculation on God. How can farce exist in a society which has lost all its certainties and loosened all the rigid social and moral structures which were the launching pad for the farces of the past? The special pleasure of the form, as Eric Bentley has said, is that "Inhibitions are momentarily lifted, repressed thoughts are admitted into consciousness, and we experience that feeling of power and pleasure, generally called elation" (The Life of the Drama [New York, 1970], p. 230). But how if society is busy encouraging us not to repress but to express and feel free? It may be an illusion, but the assumption that freedom is our ambience does present problems for the farce writer looking for something fixed and solid to support the wild balancing acts which are the special triumph of the form. These thoughts were prompted by Michael Frayn's Noises Off, now running (August, 1982) at the Savoy Theatre, London. No doubt about it, the audience leaves the theatre, indeed reels into the foyer after each act, in the state ofhappy elation described by Bentley. The complimentary quotations from the reviews do not exaggerate: "The audience were toppling over with joy" (Standard); "This is a great farce, one of the most ingenious things I have ever seen" (Sunday Times); "An audience that wouldn't be seen dead at a sex farce laughs its head off at this one" (Observer, making a somewhat dubious categorization ). Frayn has found his answer to the problem confronting modem farce writers by turning to the theatre, one of the places where the tightest of disciplines must prevail, even though - or especially because - pleasure is the object. However trivial the piece, the players who are performing it must take rehearsals, deadlines, all the business of the stage with the same seriousness as if it were Shakespeare. "The show must go on" is a real categorical imperative. KATHAR1NE WORTH Farce requires the strictest discipline of all, so Frayn is playing a subtle game with form when he makes his farce out ofthe stage business of making a farce. We are never to get beyond Act One, so the programme tells us: a rather uneasy discovery ifone comes to the theatre knowing nothing about the play (it is not published as I write). The setting is the living-room ofthe Brents' country home, seen first, the programme tells us (it is an amusing joke in itself), at the Grand Theatre, Weston-super-Mare, then at the Theatre Royal, Goole, last at the Municipal Theatre, Stockton-an-Tees. The names tell their own tale (apologies to Weston-super-Mare!) of the company's expectations. The audience's too may be rather low as the curtain goes up on the standard lounge-hall set and a comic lady cleaner/housekeeper, Mrs. Clackett, played by Dotty Otley (after Stoppard?), comes on to do her comic business with a feather duster, a telephone and a cockney accent. She sketches in the situation (the Brents abroad, the house open to viewing by prospective tenants) and establishes some of the points round which the manic action will develop, including the most absurd of all, the plate of sardines which is always on Mrs. Clackett's mind and soon gets on to everybody else's; it is lost, found, trod on, lost again, and is altogether a splendid red herring. Having waved the comic cleaner cliche at us, Frayn then gives the piece a push in a modem direction that stretches well back into the past too. From Sheridan's The Critic to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search ofan Author, the "rehearsal"joke has been a sure-fire device for drawing the sort onaughter that allows for odd turns ofthought about the nature of the theatrical illusion. The voice from the auditorium that corrects Dotty's muddle and continually interrupts the action from then on brings us just to the fringe ofthe Pirandellian world. The hapless director...