Noises Off

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Noises Off:

‘When I’m on stage, you know something is going to go wrong’ As Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off heads for the Cambridge Arts Theatre, ELLA WALKER speaks to one of the show’s stars, Saffron Walden actor Simon Bubb

‘K

EVIN Spacey came to see our first night,” says Simon Bubb humbly. “He was very nice to me – I’d had my big break out of the Old Vic – he was very proud that I was coming back for a show with them.”

The local lad – Simon grew up in Rickling Green, just outside Saffron Walden – is currently starring in Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, alongside Neil Pearson (see facing page).

Put on by the Old Vic, it’s a farce of face-aching, stomach-wobbling hilarity that is coming to the Cambridge Arts Theatre next week.

After throwing himself into school plays, the charming and eloquent actor went on to study English at Manchester University and got stuck into the drama society where “people just sort of said, actually you’re good, you should try and train professionally”.

So he did, spending two years at what was the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London before trying his luck on the stage.

It was the 24-hour plays, an idea introduced by Kevin Spacey, the Old Vic’s artistic director, in 2005 that offered him his ‘big break’ and well and truly kick-started his theatre career.

“You’ve got actors, writers and directors, who have 24-hour periods in which to create several little plays from nothing,” Simon explains. “The writers write it out of nowhere and the actors have to learn it and rehearse it and that night they put it on. They did it with celebrities and then they did it with up-and-coming people in the theatre so I auditioned for that and got in.”

It was a springboard that led to him working in a range of RSC and National Theatre productions, including St Joan with director Marianne Elliott, who was also about to start working on a little production called War Horse.

“I’d always wanted to do something set in the First World War so I wrote to Marianne and said ‘Please think of me if you’re casting’.” Fortunately for

Editor: Paul Kirkley. Writers: Paul Kirkley, Emma Higginbotham and Ella Walker E-mail: whatson@cambridge-news.co.uk Online: www.cambridge-news.co.uk.

him, she did – and Simon found all 6ft 3in of him cast in the uniformed role of Captain Stewart.

“It was, yeah, it was just amazing,” says Simon with a hint of wistfulness.

“I remember the first day of rehearsals, we were all in the rehearsal room, and before we did anything they got the puppeteers to step inside and take the horses round the room.

The whole room just went quiet and I think we, well I, realised then, that this might be something special.

“I didn’t know it would become quite as big as it is now. It’s become an industry. And I didn’t imagine at that stage it would be made into a film. I was performing it in the West End when Steven Spielberg came to see it and then he came and met us all afterwards.

“Unfortunately Benedict Cumberbatch ended up playing my part in the film, but there you go,” he adds, laughing.

Did he enjoy the film? “I thought the way Spielberg dealt with the war scenes was really impressive. It was still a bit weird, having been part of this thing for so long and then seeing it up on the big screen.

“I feel very lucky to have been part of it from very near the beginning.”

War Horse might have become an almighty force in the worlds of theatre and film, but Noises Off has its own reputation: for being an absolute nightmare to put together. “The director said to us on the first day of rehearsals: ‘Welcome to Noises Off, it’s absolute heaven to perform and absolute hell to rehearse’,” says Simon. “There’s absolutely no choice but to go over it again and again and again until you’ve got it.”

He plays Tim Allgood, the hapless company stage manager of Nothing On (the ramshackle play within the play). “It’s set in the early 80s, and back then, it’s a tradition that’s almost gone now, but stage managers would quite often be a young actor who’d just come out of drama school and their job would be to look after everything backstage and then understudy for as many parts as they had to,” Simon explains. “So he’s one

I Noises Off, Cambridge Arts Theatre, MondaySaturday April 8-13 at 7.45pm. Tickets £15-£35 from (01223) 503333 cambridgeartstheatre. puurchase-tickets-online.co.uk

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Neil Pearson: I’m a big fan NEIL Pearson really should have known better. He must have been well aware of what he was getting into when agreeing to play Lloyd, the hard-pressed director of Nothing On, the tacky farce that is at the heart of Noises Off. But Pearson is clearly not a man to shirk a challenge, although at the half-way point in a four-week rehearsal period, he was wondering why he wasn’t spending more time with his collection of much-prized rare books instead.

“I think it’s fair to say that the more impossible a farce is to do, the better it is. You normally have four weeks’ rehearsal to put on a play and during that time you hope to progress from zero to 10. It’s an incremental process. But after two and a half weeks, we all feel that we are still at nought and panic is setting in. Noises Off is less a piece of theatre than a magic act which you have to learn. It’s plate-spinning and there’s quite a lot of broken crockery lying on the floor of the rehearsal room at the moment.”

Pearson is consoled by the fact that veterans of the play’s five years at the Savoy Theatre and of the other two major productions at the National Theatre and at the Old Vic all attest to feeling precisely the same emotions at this stage of rehearsals.

In deciding to join the cast of Noises Off, not only did Pearson wish to examine the workings of farce from the inside, as it were, but he was also a keen admirer of the work of Michael Frayn.

“Anyone who has written a play of the stature of Noises Off can die happy,” he says.

“Anyone, like Michael, who has written a play as great as Copenhagen as well as Noises Off is a very special

of those. It’s obviously not a very good production that he’s part of, he’s got far too much to do and he’s not very good at it. So, my part in helping the farce go on is that the audience has the sense that when I’m involved something is probably going to go wrong . . .”

He first saw the play 10 years ago, and admits: “I’ve literally never laughed so much in the theatre. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I think it was just one of those things, when you’ve seen something like that you think it must be so much fun to be in.”

Luckily his hunch was right – “It’s wonderful to spend every night in front of a packed house full of people laughing themselves silly,” he says – but he also fancied the challenge of taking on such a complex show.

“It is an incredibly technically difficult thing to pull off. It’s like learning a really complicated dance routine almost, because the whole of the second act is pretty much done in silence but has millions of little moves where everything has to be in exactly the right place.”

Opening night must have been a daunting prospect: “We were just relieved we got through it,” says Simon. “Michael Frayn was with us the first day of rehearsals and he said: ‘I’ve only got two words for you: health and safety.’ It’s got a reputation this play for injuring actors because we’re all charging around and in danger of bumping into things.

“We were just pleased to have got through it without anyone dying,” he laughs.

Let’s hope the cast all make it to Cambridge – preferably intact.

breed. The point about the play is that it’s put together by a scientific mind. It’s a farce about a farce that has been constructed with consummate accuracy.”

When an actor plays a director, he could be forgiven for settling a few scores in his interpretation of the character, given the hostilities that can break out between the two. If Pearson is including aspects of reallife directors with whom he’s had dealings, he is keeping diplomatically mum when asked about their identities.

“I’d better not answer that question – otherwise I’ll never work again,” says Pearson wryly.

What’s his view of Lloyd? Is he likely to have such eminent figures as Nicholas Hytner of the National Theatre or Gregory Doran of the RSC quaking in their boots?

“I don’t think that Lloyd is an especially good director,” Pearson replies. “If he were, would he be staging this cheesy, 1970s-style farce with antiquated attitudes and attractive girls running around in their underwear? In his head, he’d like to be directing a show on Broadway and I doubt if working on a piece such as Nothing On was in the game plan when he graduated from a minor university with a 2:2.”

How accurate a picture does No oises Off give of the trials involved in putting on a piece of live theatre?

“I think that Michael Frayn must have sat in the stalls many times and watched what was happening in rehearsals on stage because he’s missed nothing. Noises Off very faithfully reproduces that atmosphere of bonhomie and wide-eyed panic that permeates most theatres.”

Michael Frayn: It was like sculpting with jelly

PLAYWRIGHT Michael Frayn has long had a weakness for farce. Noises Off was inspired, he says, by a visit backstage during a performance of his play The Two Of Us, which opened in Cambridge and became a venture that would go on to have a lasting impact far beyond its own lifespan.

“We had a very good first week in Cambridge,” Frayn recalls.

“It was four short plays, one of which was a farce, and all the plays were performed by two actors – Richard Briers and Lynn Redgrave. In the farce, they were playing five characters between them and,

when you watched it from backstage, you saw the two of them running wildly between doors, changing costumes as they went, and stage management holding an arm at this door or putting a chair at that door to make you think they were still there. And I thought it was rather funnier than what was going on round the front.”

So he sat down to write a play showing exactly that. The result, Noises Off, is now a bona fide theatrical phenomenon, a hilarious play within (or, more accurately, behind) a play that raises the

concept of a West End farce to something approaching high art. Since opening in London in 1982, with a cast including Patricia Routledge and Paul Eddington, it has gone on to be performed all over the world, won numerous awards and was adapted into a (slightly iffy) film starring Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve and Carol Burnett.

But it was no easy task to create the play in the beginning.

“Writing Noises Off was difficult,” says Frayn with feeling. “It was like trying to make a sculpture out of jelly.

Every time you change

something in one of the acts, it bulges out in the other two. I often cursed the day I ever decided to write it. Michael Blakemore, the director of the first production, promised to give the play his best shot, but said he had really no idea whether it would work or not.

And, as we left the rehearsal room at the end of each day, I could see his reassuring smile draining away to bleak anxiety.”

Despite numerous rewrites though, Noises Off has arrived at the definitive version, and Frayn’s account of actors struggling to achieve a theatrical performance has

struck a universal chord. But why?

“I think that it’s connected to the fear which we all have inside ourselves that we might be unable to go on with the performance. It’s amazing how many people find public speaking terrifying, even if it’s just in front of family and friends at a wedding. And an audience is an intense version of the world around us in general.

“We all feel that we might break down – and we sometimes do. So when we see it happening to those idiots up there on the stage in a farce it’s a release of the tension.”

REWRITES: Michael Frayn