Review: "The Play that Goes Wrong" at West End (Duchess Theatre)

The West End transfer of this farce is a play within a play and a study in chaos. 

The show is a farcical play-within-a-play. Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society is producing a hoary old sub-‘Mousetrap’ mystery called ‘The Murder at Haversham Manor.’ From the first moment, in which a hapless stage manager attempts to secure a collapsing mantelpiece, we suspect things will not go as planned. And that, indeed, is the case as the production shudders painfully into chaos, taking in everything from dropped lines to disintegrating sets, intra-cast fighting, technical malfunctions of the highest order, and an unexpectedly resuscitated corpse.

The show sits in a fine tradition of British slapstick and of plays about theatrical blunders: its debt to Michael Frayn’s hilarious ‘Noises Off,’ about the gradual disintegration of a touring rep production, is considerable. To be fair, this is acknowledged by the play’s marketing, which calls it — correctly — ‘“Fawlty Towers” meets “Noises Off.”’ But the trouble is that anyone who has seen and loved ‘Noises Off’ is likely to find the comparison unfavorable: Frayn’s play simply does all the same things and does them better.

Still, there are laughs to be had here, and the production is a technical triumph: ensuring that props and sets collapse on cue without actually injuring anyone is a genuine feat of stage management.