SJT takes on ‘impossible task’ of staging Noises Off in the round for first time in 43-year history of Michael Frayn’s farce

Alex Phelps, centre, in rehearsal for Noises Off with Valerie Antwi and Charlie Ryan. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

THE first ever in-the-round production of Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off opens at Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre on Saturday, fully 43 years since its Lyric Theatre, London premiere.

“I’ve wanted to direct this play for years,” says SJT artistic director Paul Robinson. “The assumption was that doing it this way was impossible. When I told Michael about our plans, his response was an amused ‘good luck’.” The director has since printed off Frayn’s message to hang on a rehearsal room wall.  

“Our designer, Kevin Jenkins, and I have spent months meticulously planning and he has come up with an ingenious set, which has really been worth the wait.”

A precursor to Mischief Theatre’s canon of theatrical catastrophes kick-started by The Play That Goes Wrong, Noises Off follows the on and off-stage antics of a touring theatre company stumbling its way through the fictional farce Nothing On.

“One of the greatest British comedies ever written, Noises Off is a hilarious and heartfelt tribute to the world of theatre but also about how futile it is to try to impose our ideas on the world around us, as things will always go wrong,” says Paul. “It’s how you respond to them when they do!”

Alex Phelps in the role of the Ringmaster in Tilted Wig and York Theatre Royal’s production of Around The World In 80 Days in 2023

Among Robinson’s cast that includes Alan Ayckbourn stalwart Christopher Godwin, northern theatre luminary Andy Cryer and Brookside, Coronation Street and Doctor Who alumna Susan Twist will be Alex Phelps, a dapper chap whose adroit, graceful comedic theatre skills will be familiar to York audiences.

After the dandy buffoonery of his Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Joyce Branagh’s Jazz Age take on Twelfth Night for Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre at the Eye of York in Summer 2019, he appeared in the dual roles of Ringmaster and unscrupulous globe-trotting Phileas Fog in Tilted Wig’s touring collaboration with York Theatre Royal in the circus-themed Around The World In 80 Days in February 2023.

Next came the “selfish, hypocritical, vain, manipulative, deceptively charming” Joseph Surface in Tilted Wig’s account of Sheridan’s Georgian comedy of manners The School For Scandal at the Theatre Royal in April 2024.

From Saturday, in Noises Off, he will be playing Gary Lejeune, whose character profile on Wikipedia describes him as: “The play’s leading man, a solid actor who is completely incapable of finishing a sentence unless it is dialogue. Constantly stutters and ends sentences with ‘you know’. Dating Dotty and prone to jealousy.”

“He’s the young one, as his name suggests, which is very telling,” says Alex. “Michael Frayn’s biography for him says Gary has ‘not done much theatre’. He’s one of those actors we might all recognise from theatre companies, who feels the need to speak up for the company without thinking about what he’s going to say .

Alex Phelps’s Joseph Surface in Tilted Wig’s The School For Scandal, on tour at York Theatre Royal in 2024

“He feels things very deeply but through his great inarticulacy he lacks the capacity to express that feeling. He doesn’t know how to make his point…but you will still be able to work it out!”

Alex is delighted to be part of a cast taking on the challenge of staging Noises Off in the round, where actors have to perform to an audience seated all around them. “We’re going for it! We really are. We’ve got a lot of pride in the SJT deciding to do it.

“Given the history of the SJT, and Alan Ayckbourn’s plays here, it’s all about connecting with the audience. For this production, Paul and Kevin have been thinking about it and working on it for ages, going back and forth with Michael Frayn. If we come a cropper in rehearsals, we’ll contact Michael for advice.”

Across three acts, Noises Off charts the shambolic final rehearsals, a disastrous matinee, seen entirely from backstage, and the calamitous final performance.

“It’s a masterpiece,” says Alex. “The beauty of the writing: it’s so well observed; what actors are like; what it’s like in the rehearsal room and backstage at a performance and on a long tour.”

What’s in the box? Alex Phelps and Valerie Antwi in the Stephen Joseph Theatre rehearsal room, working on Noises Off. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

And now, not only must Robinson’s actors present the play within the play, but the set design has to accommodate showing the stage from backstage before staging the disastrous final show.

“The stage has to be back to front but inside out too,” says Alex. “So if you have to think about it, it’s madness to get your head around!”

There will, of course, be a profusion of doors. “Doors and farce are synonymous with each other because the rhythm of the banging of doors is so important to farce,” says Alex. “The more we do it, the more I think it’s like a musical, with the rhythm building to what I hope is laughter, and then it all takes flight.

“Michael Blakemore [director of the 1982 premiere], in his introduction, has said how some of the best performances of Noises Off are the first ones, where the pressures are so high to get it right, but the actors don’t know what will happen, so there’ll be that sense of danger.”

Can’t wait!

Noises Off runs amok at Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, from August 9 to September 6, 7.30pm plus 1.30pm Thursday and 2.30pm Saturday matinees. Box office: 01723 370541 or sjt.uk.com.

REVIEW: Ayckbourn’s The Girl Next Door, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough ****

“Spatial continuum anomaly”: Naomi Petersen’s wartime Lily and Bill Champion’s pandemic-times Rob bridge the age gap in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Girl Next Door. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

Alan Ayckbourn’s The Girl Next Door, Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until July 3. Box office: 01723 370541 and at sjt.uk.com

WHO else but director emeritus and Scarborough knighted playwright Alan Ayckbourn could be at the helm of the Stephen Joseph Theatre’s first in-house production of 2021.

He has been chomping at the bit, as the racehorse saying goes, writing even more prolifically and recording and sound-editing two audio plays, Anno Domino and the reawakened ghost story Haunting Julia, as lockdown followed lockdown.

He has missed the interaction with actors and audience alike, as last summer’s premiere of Truth Will Out never did reveal its topical virus truths in The Round.

How joyful to see Sir Alan, 82 and stick in hand, taking his familiar back-row seat for the Tuesday’s press night performance. It was another sign of live theatre’s resurrection, even with the continuing need for face masks, social distancing and a reduced capacity.

The Girl Next Door is premiere number 85, and glory be, it is inventive, witty, poignant, moving and surprising in the best Ayckbourn tradition, with plenty of mischievous humour too, whether digging into politics, Zoom, love, war, English characteristics, our past and present, what has changed, what hasn’t.

All this is wrapped in a tale suffused with magic realism (or not, you decide!) and Ayckbourn’s familiar relish for playing with time. In this case, he applies the term “spatial continuum anomaly” for surely the first time, along with references to Doctor Who and Star Wars.

Standard attire for a Zoom meeting: Alexandra Mathie’s Westminster civil servant Alex at home in The Girl Next Door. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

Ayckbourn’s frustration at his absence from the rehearsal room and stage since 2019 finds a messenger on stage in the form of actor Rob Hathaway (Ayckbourn stalwart Bill Champion), head in his hands, stuck at home in August 2020, sixty, sagging and sad.

He laments the hiatus from all that he loves about theatre, above all the connection, and no, Shakespeare sonnets being performed by glove puppets online is no substitute.

Bored with the prospect of watching yet another box set or daytime TV after losing his role, for disciplinary reasons, as the star of the nation’s favourite TV period drama, National Fire Service, he keeps re-living his past as George ‘Tiger’ Jennings, wartime hero and living firefighter legend, rather than living for the day or even having his morning Cornflakes.

Lockdown has been shared with his big sister, very sensible civil servant Alex (Ayckbourn regular Alexandra Mathie), who has just finished a Zoom meeting with the Chancellor (female, as it happens). We know the ever-sharp Ayckbourn is on the ball because she is wearing pyjamas beneath a jacket, as so many have!

Champion’s enervated Rob is suddenly perked up by the sight of a stranger, a young woman hanging out the washing in the next-door garden. Who is she, he wonders, as the owners, the Jessops, have chosen to isolate at their second home in the Dorset country.

She, we shall learn, is Lily (Naomi Petersen), and on her side of the hedge, it is August 1942, wartime London is under bombardment; the garden has been given over to growing vegetables, with an Anderson shelter beyond. Husband Alf (Linford Johnson) is away doing his bit for Blighty in a tank regiment in Africa; their two children, six and seven, are away too, out of contact, evacuated to somewhere in the country.

What’s it all about, Alfie? Linford Johnson’s 1942 soldier-on-leave Alf sips on a 21st century bottled beer in The Girl Next Door. Picture: Tony Bartholomew

We note the differences, beautifully drawn out by designer Kevin Jenkins: a hosepipe, security lights and characterless all mod cons in the Hathaway kitchen; a watering can, no outdoor lighting and a stove and hand-operated washing equipment for Lily. As ever in an Ayckbourn production, the doors are cut off at halfway but are used almost as regularly as in a farce.

For all the presence of Alex, Rob is adrift; Lily is alone, and through Ayckbourn’s aforementioned “spatial continuum anomaly”, their worlds meet, with all the bewildering confusions and misunderstandings that go with that division of 78 years yet only a hedge.

Born in 1939, and so a wartime London child, Ayckbourn recalls a “sort of lockdown”  of that time, crowding into Anderson shelters and subway stations, and so he draws parallels with the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021. Rob keeps mentioning social distancing; Lily mistakes the security lighting for searchlights; Mathie’s Alex mentions she has a wife; Lily is unnerved by the machine-dominated kitchen. Ayckbourn revels in both the similarities and contrasts with the past.

He even plays with knowing about the past, and what  burden that may place on Rob if he were to try to change the course of history. Rather than Back To The Future fun and games, however, Ayckbourn keeps this thread – in the story of Alf – on a more serious trajectory, one of intrigue and mystery in the more melancholic yet still hopeful second half.

On top of it all, in his own words, The Girl Next Door is “an affirmation of love across the generations”, a love that stops feckless, twice divorced Rob in his tracks.

There is a second love story too here: Ayckbourn’s abiding love of theatre, its magic, mystery, wonder, profundity and possibilities, brought to life by a wonderful cast, with a typically brilliant Ayckbourn drinking scene to boot. How blessed we are to be sharing his vision, his playfulness, his wisdom, anew.

Review copyright of The Press, York