Timing and physical precision bring out the humour in 'funniest play of the 20th century'
Credit to Author: Shawn Conner| Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2020 19:10:45 +0000
Noises Off
When: Jan. 23-Feb. 23
Where: Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage
Tickets: From $29 at artsclub.com and 604-687-1644
In Noises Off, Tess Degenstein plays an actress named Brooke Ashton. For Degenstein, her character can be summed up in a pithy stage direction: “Her thoughts are elsewhere.”
“We’re trying to avoid the stereotype of her being dumb,” said the Saskatchewan-raised actress, whom Vancouver audiences last saw in the Arts Club’s production of the interactive Blind Date. “But there is a lot of humour that comes from her missing information or misinterpreting information. She has thoughts, they’re just elsewhere.”
Brooke is an actress in a second-tier acting troupe in British playwright Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. The company is touring a play called Nothing’s On in backwoods England when a behind-the-scenes love triangle spills out onto the stage in the most embarrassing ways possible (think whiskey, axes and exposed secrets).
Timing is everything, as they say, and the 1982 comedy — “the funniest play written in the 20th century,” according to American columnist/critic Frank Rich — requires precision.
“I use a lot of math language in talking to people about it,” said Scott Bellis, the real, behind-the-scenes director of Noises Off. “The script, especially the second act, tells you who’s supposed to move on what line. That’s how detailed the playwright has made the script for the actors. A lot of it is like following a recipe. We are following the math. Once we’ve learned what the mathematical equations are, the challenge is, how do we make them human enough so that we can be relaxed inside it, and so can the audience, so that the humour can come right out.”
Brooke is one-third of the triangle, which also includes the play-within-a-play’s director, Lloyd Dallas (Andrew McNee) and assistant stage manager Poppy Norton-Taylor (Ming Hudson).
Other characters include the theatre troupe’s leading man, Garry Lejeune (Charlie Gallant), who is incapable of finishing a sentence unless it’s a line of dialogue; Selsdon Mowbray (Andy Maton), an elderly actor who is fond of the bottle; Dotty Otley (Colleen Winton), a middle-aged TV star and one of the play’s principal investors; and overworked stage manager Tim Allgood (Nora McLellan). Emma Slip and Jovanni Sy also star.
Chemistry between the performers is about trust, especially in comedy, says Bellis.
“The trust is that you’re going to be there for each other, hit your mark consistently and have your focus where it needs to be,” he said. “The teamwork is deep and really subtle. Every theatre piece requires a different kind of focus. This one requires a lot of listening, a lot of eye contact and a lot of physical precision.”
The play is constructed tightly enough that even a simple action can garner a huge laugh, says Degenstein.
“Because the given circumstances are what they are, something as simple as opening a door can get a huge reaction. As an actor that’s so delightful. And you don’t even have to work that hard.”
Other laughs come from the play’s structure. This is one of the aspects of Noises Off that Bellis is looking forward to sharing with an audience.
“What’s so brilliant about the play is that it spends a lot of time in the first act showing the audience how the play is supposed to go,” he said. “And as the play moves on the audience gets to see how it goes wrong. But because they’ve learned how it’s supposed to go, they’re in a position of power. They can see how it’s going wrong. And there’s a lot of enjoyment for the audience in that.”