Noises Off

A major new revival of Michael Frayn's classic backstage comedy Noises Off in London featuring Janie Dee and Celia Imrie.

Noises Off is a glorious comic romp, which offers two plays for the price of one.

Whilst the traditional British farce Nothing On is being performed, a real life farce unfolds backstage during the show's final rehearsal and the ensuing disastrous tour. Nothing On and Noises Off interlock as the actors make their exits from one play only to find themselves making entrances into the other and back again. All the classic comedy elements are here: mistaken identity, door slamming and effortless timing.

The cast for this production of Noises Off in London features Jonathan Coy, Janie Dee, Robert Glenister, Jamie Glover, Celia Imrie, Karl Johnson and Paul Ready. Casting subject to change. It is directed by Lindsay Posner with designs by Peter McKintosh, lighting by Paul Pyant and sound by Fergus O'Hare.

"This is one of the great comic plays in the English language, and Lindsay Posner's revival, now transferred from the cavernous Old Vic to the intimate Novello, more than gives it its due. I defy anyone not to emerge from the theatre chuckling with joy at its sheer Swiss–clock cleverness... The cast is so uniformly magnificent it is unfair to single anyone out... But the play really is the thing: a cherishable tribute to farce which simultaneously dissects its mechanisms and makes them work. It's rare to sit in the theatre and feel every single care slip away, but Noises Off is the antidote to all gloom. Long may it run." The Daily Telegraph

"Lindsay Posner's production is a feat of technical brilliance that hasn't sagged in the least since I saw it three and a half months ago, but neither (despite two new cast members) has it much changed: finely tuned, superbly crafted, but a thing of mechanical precision rather than wild laughter. It's at its most rewarding in the second act, a ballet of backstage chaos whose astonishing intricacy - a blur of errant props, mistimed cues and acts of silent revenge - would not have disgraced Merce Cunningham." The Guardian

"If anything, the long run and the transfer have sharpened it. The ending seems tauter and there are even new, fast-flying, marginal jokes in the mimetic and breathtakingly choreographed second act, when we see from backstage the warring cast of Nothing On reaching Ashton-under-Lyme and breaking-point a month into the tour. There was already more 'business' than Lord Sugar sees in a year, what with the bouquet, the whisky bottle, the sheets, the axe and the cactus. Frayn 's storytelling skill means that, even on a first viewing, you know from the first act — the rehearsal — not only what is supposed to happen on stage, but what drives the actors in their private lives." The Times

The original stage version of Noises Off was presented in London first at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in February 1982 before it transferred to London's West End, opening at the Savoy Theatre on 31 March 1982 where is enjoyed a run of 4½ years, winning both the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for 'Best Comedy'.

Noises Off in London at the Old Vic Theatre previewed from 3 December 2011, opened on 13 December 2011 and closed 25 February 2012 before transferring to the Novello Theatre from 24 March 2012 to 30 June 2012.