The Play That Goes Wrong

Or: Murphy’s Law and Order

What makes comedy? I could raise a cry of the creeping codger within me to talk about reveling in rude immature humor, or self-aware contortions and their eyewaterinw two-tone paint of art. But a critic’s job isn’t to fume, but share so I was so happy to spend an evening at a touring production of The Play That Goes Wrong which proves that true comedy truly consists of people getting hurt and humiliating themselves.

Created by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, The Play That Goes Wrong is, The Murder At Havisham Manor! brought to Boise’s far flung stage from Cornley University Drama Society of England. Charles Haversham (Jonathan Harris, <Chris French>)* lies dead in a locked room while his brother Cecil (Max Bennett, <Adam Petherbridge>), finance Florence (Sandra Wilkinson, <Jacquline Jarrold>), best friend Thomas (Robert Grove <Michael Thatcher>), trusty butler Perkins (Dennis Tyde <Todd Buonopane>) and the neighboring inspector ( plus director and designer and fight choreographer Chris Bean <Chris Lancely>) set out to solve the baffling mystery. At leas that’s what’s supposed to happen. But the play is aptly named and everything you can thing might go wrong does go wrong, up to and and including fire, set destruction, and (possibly?) murder.

Even before the houselights dim the set is falling apart forcing Stage Manager Annie Twilloil (<Ashely D Kelley>) and Duran-Duran loving light and Sound operator Trevor Watson (<Conor Seamus Moroney>), to conscript members of the audience to hold mantelpieces up and doors closed. And then it sprints out of the gate, pumping to its own destruction, with the corpse of Charles Haversham deliciously not quite as dead as he’d like to be.

It’s very difficult to talk about the Play That Goes Wrong because it’s composed and threaded and orchestrated almost entirely of gags, and it’s a poor review that spoils a joke. But such gags! Building at either rapid or cunningly slow pace, they slither over each-others shoulders to ever more ridiculous heights. It’s funny enough when malaprop-prone Dennis detects trace amounts of “Kaia-Needy!” (figure it out) in the second act but it wouldn’t raise the foot stamping howls it does without standing on the shoulders of all the misbegotten words that have come before.

It’s also a beautiful piece of theater becomes it renders its actors objectives crystalline: don’t get crushed by the decaying set. The raucous laughter of the audience was interspersed quite frequently by screams as another intrigue bit of plywood or prop failed spectacularly. Designed by Nigel Hook the precarious opulence of Cornley University not only speaks to high hopes and low budgets of theater projects around the world, is a beautiful, beautiful deathtrap. I was struck at the end of the show by thinking about less than broadway experienced theaters (high schools even) attempting to put it on with all the will of the Cornley players. The fatalities. The Fatalities! The hidden gadgets and devices and occasional works of old fashioned stage magic almost outshine the actors as it goes through every possible instance of trying to thwart them. Which is not to say the cast holds any shirkers, everyone throwing themselves into styles of terrible acting that suit them best. Special mentions go to French for being the world’s most obliging corpse and suffering all sorts of abuse, Petherbridge for leaning in to Bennett’s magnificently bad acting (inventing a whole new form on BSL at one point), and Kelley for giving us the most defined “arc” of the play being swept backstage into the action, discovering her glory onstage, and using her stage-management prowess for evil.

Unlike other famous backstage comedies such as Noises Off or Inspecting Carol or 10 out of 12, The Play That Goes Wrong we get almost nothing of the backstage lives of the “actors.” The dramas and romances and dreams of theater folk, over ripe and low hanging fruit for any writer, are not over much in evidence. And that makes it all the stronger, it’s all about the cascade, the failing system, the near miss, the call of the void, the desire to pull the nails out a railway track and set the popcorn in the microwave at the sound of a distant whistle.

And yet. There is evidence of enormous heart, untalked of but clearly seen, because even while everything is going to pieces, even while the prop scotch is swapped with cleaning fluids, even when fire erupts on stage followed by an even more disruptive attempt to douse it (“I thought: it’s getting hot in here. So, take off all your coals. Yes, I’m very hot, so I’m going to take my coals off.”), long long after any sane or sensible person would have run to the godmic and yelled, “please hold,” and sent everyone home, they are still trying to do the play. Even Chris Bean the acerbic actor manager who’s not above breaking his performance to yell at his audience (and I love it when a touring production does its homework, to nettle each town right where it matters), will hang his head and go along with the most harebrained schemes his collaborators cook up to make sure that the show goes on. Because the third thing that assures comedy all over the world, besides pain and humiliation, is cleverness: the spark of something never before thought of, and the willingness to share it with an audience and make them feel as much a part of it as you.

Name of character (name of fictional actor) <name of real(?*) actor>.

** “RealityIsAnIllusionTheUniverseIsAHologramBUYGOLDBYYYYYYYE!”