It's strangely involving to watch actors struggle heroically in a ludicrous play. When absolutely everything goes wrong on stage, as when everything goes right, we're treated to drama that is urgent, spontaneous, unmistakably alive.
Yet whoever heard of a play in which both extremes of theatergoing pleasure occupy the same stage at the same time? That's what happens at Michael Frayn's "Noises Off."… All three acts of this play recycle the same theatrical catastrophe: We watch a half-dozen has-been and never-were British actors, at different stops on a provincial tour, as they perform the first act of a puerile, door-slamming sex farce titled "Nothing On." With a plot involving wayward plates of sardines, misplaced clothing and an Arab sheik, "Nothing On" is the silliest and most ineptly acted play one could ever hope to encounter. But out of its lunacies, Mr. Frayn has constructed the larger prank of "Noises Off"—which is as cleverly conceived and adroitly performed a farce as Broadway has seen in an age….
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