Review: The Play That Goes Wrong, Hippodrome

The challenge when reviewing The Play That Goes Wrong is to avoid comparisons with Michael Frayn’s Noises Off. There are obvious and deliberate similarities but there are important differences too, and to write off TPTGW as a poor relation would be lazy journalism – and just plain wrong.

Both productions are opportunities to enjoy just how many things can go wrong during a theatrical performance, and both get big laughs out of watching a poor beleaguered cast trying desperately to hold things together when all is crumbling about them (mostly the scenery). It’s also true that both play off an audience’s natural anxiety about what might happen for real when they go to the theatre.

Noises Off is a more sophisticated piece – it’s more character-based and it develops over three performances separated by some months as the cast slowly come to hate each other’s guts – but goodness me, TPTGW is very, very funny. It delivers big belly laughs roughly every five or ten seconds, until the audience is close to hysterics.

The story of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society’s attempts to stage a 1920s murder mystery, it’s a play within a play – and is in a highly slapstick comic mode, packed with finely-tuned farce in the style of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and delivered with split-second timing and extraordinary daring. It must take a lot of hard work and rigorous rehearsal to appear this amateur and chaotic.

The accident-prone company are also famously impoverished, and have had to adapt some of their upcoming productions in order to mount them at all. Bristol might soon be treated to their version of Waiting For Godot – “one remote tree, no cast” whilst previous shows have included James and the Peach and Jack and the Bean.

Mischief Theatre was founded in 2008 by a group of graduates of The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and began as an improvised comedy group. The story goes that their first performance of TPTGW had only four paying members of the public in the audience: but the show went on to play to almost one and a half million worldwide in 2017 as it won 11 international awards, including the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and the 2017 Tony Award for its Broadway transfer.  It continues to play to sold out houses in the West End, and it’s also now Broadway’s longest running play. That’s a rags-to-riches story so good it really ought to be true.

TPTGW is written by Mischief Theatre company members Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields. The company have another production coming to Bristol in the future, The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, where I imagine we can expect more of the same.

The Hippodrome audience roared with laughter on this first night and rewarded the cast with a standing ovation. I’m not underestimating the performers in any way but the play is interestingly – and cleverly – celebrity-proof, not requiring big names or star performers to wow the crowds. All the players need to be good enough to play their parts – and that’s no mean achievement – but it’s a tribute to the writing and staging that the show wouldn’t be any funnier with Ant and Dec playing the main parts.

For once the programme is well worth forking out for. Appropriately enough for a play within a play, this is a programme within a programme – full of in jokes, clever witticisms and fake actor’s biogs.

Another refreshing difference between this and Noises Off is that the TPTGW cast all seem to be trying to help each other to overcome the disasters that befall them instead of revelling in other’s misfortunes – although there is some delicious rivalry between glamorous vamp Sandra (played by Elena Valentine) and her understudy (Catherine Dryden) who is at first unwilling to take on the role but is soon taking every chance to viciously upstage Annie. At least I think that’s who’s playing who, but I might have been confused by the spoof programme.

The Play That Goes Wrong continues at the Hippodrome until Saturday 21st July. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.atgtickets.com/shows/the-play-that-goes-wrong/bristol-hippodrome