Theatre

The Play That Goes Wrong

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

five stars

JOHN Cleese wrote recently about the current state of farce on the British stage and unaccountably failed to mention the phenomenon that is The Play That Goes Wrong. Created in a North London pub theatre by a trio of burger-flipping resting thesps, it has enjoyed two stints on the West End as well as Edinburgh Fringe and Broadway runs, and packed out Glasgow's opera house on a Monday night at the start of a very busy week's run. What Cleese failed to acknowledge, the ticket-buying public is clearly well aware of.

TPTGW trades not just on the tradition of farce that Fawlty Towers borrowed from Georges Feydeau, but also the strain of backstage am-dram presented on a professional platform typified by Michael Frayn's Noises Off. It assumes some awareness of all that heritage on the part of the audience before then sending up that pastiche genre mercilessly, and – if the first night audience is anything to go by – being rewarded in spades. If you thought too hard about the multiple levels of post-modern irony that makes some of the sight gags work, your head might well explode, but you'll be laughing too hard for that to be any sort of realistic possibility.

When Patrick Warner, playing director Chris Bean, onstage as Inspector Carter, the investigating officer of Murder at Haversham Manor, became involved in a haranguing match with Monday's paying public, we reached a pinnacle of interactivity that performance artists would envy, however much he (as Chris) denied that possibility. Yet the excursion was as perfectly pitched as a scene where the ensemble is trapped in a loop of text. Froth for sure, but absolutely brilliantly executed.