Noises Off in cueFANFARE’s Production. Review by Simon Jenner, July 10 2026
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
So how can the funniest, most intricate farce work when farces need sets and we’re in an open theatre? It helps the actors are firing on six-star cylinders and the set’s simple ingenuity concentrates the evening wonderfully. It also helps the small but acclaimed Cue FANFARE’s back after their production of what FringeReview’s David Rumelle declared a “bonkers, barmy but brilliant” Ben-Hur in May. Michael Frayn’s Noises Off arrives at BOAT till July 11 directed by Patric Kearns. Who actually plays the director.
Sardines. And doors. Remember what the play’s about. Michael Frayn in fact realised 20 years on from its 1982 launch that he’d got a door entrance (to backstage, now in fact out front) in Act 2 of Noises Off cued wrong; and changed it. It’s a love-letter to farces but most of all the theatre. Every theatrical type you’ve ever dreamed of never meeting is here. Is it the funniest play ever written? Certainly the most ingenious in living memory. Only Ayckbourn rivals it.
Harry Hart, Zoe Doano and Peter Lovstrom in Noises Off. Photo Credit: Laura Miranda
That 20 years on might have been the week two Japanese productions played opposite each other and one excluded the third act.
Nothing can possibly go wrong. Nothing a damaged Alpha male, an Alpha minus director and an alcoholic, an apologetic dimwit, a distressed stage manager, a lens-losing leading ingenue, a supremely coping leading lady and heroically coping ASM/emergency walk-on called Tim can’t possibly fix. Unless several are trying to kill each other backstage.
Noises Off depth-charges the whole genre of farce. With devastating logic. Every moment builds up like Duchamp’s Machine that destroys itself.
First, there’s the cringingly-dated farce-within-a-farce: Nothing On, the touring Brian Rix-style vehicle we see in three stages. A tech/dress rehearsal onstage; mid-run matinee backstage; last-legs onstage again. Let’s avoid confusion and (with one exception) only use the farce’s actors’ names played by the real actors.
Tax-exile playwright and partner Frederick Fellowes (Ben Roddy) and Belinda Blair (Claire Marlowe) sneak back to their house for some tax-dodging sex as Emmerdale’s Anna Brecon as maid Dotty Otley tries coping with sardine, phone and newspaper cues. Before she’s gone a few lines Kearns as sarcastic philandering director Lloyd Dallas throws confusing corrections: with just the right contempt to someone missing her cues but bankrolling the production for her retirement.
But before Dotty vanishes and they appear, estate agent (Harry Hart’s Garry Lejeune) and tax-inspector mistress (Zoe Doano’s Brooke Ashton, playing Vicki) sneak up to pursue an affair in an empty house. Each couple’s ignorant of the other’s existence. It’s bad till it get worse. That’s when Peter Lovstrom’s burglar, drunken actor Selsdon Mowbray breaks in.
Cue Kearn’s Lloyd Dallas, who doesn’t take kindly to gormless Garry wanting to know motivation, Frederick not understanding the sequence of events, a drunken Selsdon and once sovereign farceur Dotty. Lloyd’s off soon to direct a Richard III with a Richard suffering a bad back.
Not to worry, he’s moved on from Meg Forgan’s Poppy Norton-Taylor’s coping ASM to young casting-couch lead Brooke Ashton who’s as blind to other actors as she is without her lenses: which send the cast scurrying to look for something still in her eye. Sounds like her talent. But Lloyd didn’t cast her for that.
Later Lloyd sends Josh Tomley’s overworked and rather heroic ASM dogsbody Tim Allgood to buy roses for Brooke. Three times. There’s a reason. Just as there’s a reason why by the end four (not three, as is ususal) identically-dressed burglars break in speaking the same lines we’ve been regaled with throughout. He knows just who Brooke’s character is too. He calls her Vicki for good reason.
That’s before two sheikhs of a sheet’s tail turn up.
Anna Brecon in Noises Off. Photo Credit: Laura Miranda
That’s just a taster. It’s the second act where mayhem reaches an apogee never before seen on stage. The subtlety of Act Three’s denouements are relished because an adamantine logic makes us appreciate how we got there and what on earth might happen.
Act Two’s conclusion is so showstopping with a last-line, you can see why one director ended it there. But – they were wrong.
Beyond actual cues, missed cues, misunderstandings, offstage jealousies as Hart’s Garry, involved with Dotty, becomes pathologically jealous of first harmless Frederick who gets nosebleeds from pure stress; then everyone else. Hart’s required to hop up and down backstage stairs with tied feet, to jack-knife out and crash to the ground and wield an axe. His comedic brio deserves special praise over and above his trigger-persona.
Cue Fanfare’s set is a joy of clarity and simplicity with reversible coloured doors (all black in Act Two) and littered props. Kearn’s sound involves tannoy/loudspeaker noises off. And the maddeningly jolly music is pitch-perfect Seventies.
Brecon tailors a memorably deft, daft performance. Roddy is winsomely dim: that takes the art of pauses to sublimity. Marlowe seems the one sane person in the room, coping, improvising (even more than Hart) so when she windmills an arm you know there’s trouble. Kearn’s director is so bespoke 1980s you want to bottle him. Possible, thanks to Lovstrom’s magnificent unhinged moments secreting bottles everywhere. Tomley’s appealing as coping, can-do Tim, gamely doing all that’s asked of him till the mechanism elsewhere breaks. Forgan’s Poppy fuses hurt with anxious professionalism: it was a guilty pleasure watching her unravel. Doano pinpoints narcissistic young starlet Brooke stamping status with her foot taking care there’s no lens underneath: and becoming notably even more mechanical in her gestures by the end of the tour.
The plot moves so fast the point of one character being stuck with glue never comes across in any production I’ve seen (it’s about resealing envelopes). And outdoors theatre means some modulations (in-and-out-of-character) need to be blunted to carry. But Roddy’s nosebleeds are nicely signposted (not always the case) as are many details in this two-hours-fifty rollercoaster: including sardines, windblown newspapers and diminishing bunches of flowers ending pointedly with a cactus. An outstanding must-see, even for those who might have seen Noises Off more than once before. Hear this one.
Harry Hart in Noises Off. Photo Credit: Laura Miranda