Noises Off is a farce, the form of drama which is most difficult to read and most easy to dismiss from serious consideration. But such doubts should not deter any reader. Like Frayn's earlier comedies, this farce arises from a shrewd and, even, intellectual engagement in life and work in England today. Frayn is always aware of the expectations of his characters and comic disasters are so contrived that complacencies and hopes are constantly challenged and motivations defined. In this latest work Michael Frayn turns from journalism, travel, education and business, the subjects of earlier plays, and presents the world of theatre: this is a farce about the performance of a farce. Part of the joke is that Noises Off is about Nothing On: desperately the characters of Frayn's play strive to be the characters desperately involved in the play that Frayn has also written for them, and at the same time they strive to keep their own lives in some reasonable order. For most of the second act, the author has written his text in two columns, one for the on-stage action of Nothing On and the other for the off-stage action of Noises Off. That sounds complicated, and it is gloriously so in performance; the surprise is that in reading the text, the author's intentions become crystal clear without loss of wit or of the freedom of farcical fantasy. In a play where 'all round is strife and uncertainty'—as the burglar of Nothing On declaims just before final curtain—the characters speak improbable words with varying degrees of belief. The chaos that ensues is judged so nicely that their varying success gives great pleasure. A reader of the text has one advantage over a theatre audience in being able to take his own time to try to see how the trick worked.
J. R. Brown, in a review of "Noises Off," in British Book News, January, 1983, p. 54.
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