Star rating **** It must be glorious for unsuspecting audiences to stumble on Michael Frayn's extended actors' nightmare for the first time. Imagine it, being dragged along to what looks like some workaday country house farce brim-full of down-the-ages TV friendly faces, theatrical old lags, bimbos, himbos and ditzy bit-part ingenues desperate for a break.
Once there, you have to plough through some pseudy programme notes while stuck next to sweetie-wrapper rustling suburbanites who used to have a crush on the leading lady. Or maybe that's just my experience of the sort of rubbish which Frayn's brilliantly conceived study of back-stage theatrical manners so magnificently mimics, and which is still so depressingly flogged to death on the provincial circuit.
With Colin Baker and a wonderful Maggie Steed in the frame as a couple of old luvs, David Gilmore's production takes Frayn's triple-bluffing Russian doll of a play and goes hell for leather with it. Doors slam, trousers are dropped and sardines are slipped on in an astonishing, if at times not quite manic enough, merry-go-round.
To be fair, if it's exhausting for the audience to keep up, goodness only knows what it's like onstage, especially when a show such as this is upstaged by a piece of unscripted flying banister which prematurely dislodges itself.
While all the archetypes remain worryingly familiar, the worst thing that can be said about Noises Off today is that it's starting to look dangerously close to a period piece.
With this in mind, it's probably about time Frayn's work was similarly deconstructed, knocked about a bit and generally dragged into the 21st century. Then again, it probably wouldn't be nearly as much fun.
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