“Is God?”, asks Professor George Moore in Stoppard's Jumpers. “Is farce?” might be a question for today's theatre and for the same reason that bothers Moore and his wife, Dotty, in their speculation on God. How can farce exist in a society which has lost all its certainties and loosened all the rigid social and moral structures which were the launching pad for the farces of the past? The special pleasure of the form, as Eric Bentley has said, is that “Inhibitions are momentarily lifted, repressed thoughts are admitted into consciousness, and we experience that feeling of power and pleasure, generally called elation” (The Life of the Drama [New York, 1970], p. 230). But how if society is busy encouraging us not to repress but to express and feel free? It may be an illusion, but the assumption that freedom is our ambience does present problems for the farce writer looking for something fixed and solid to support the wild balancing acts which are the special triumph of the form.

These thoughts were prompted by Michael Frayn's Noises Off, now running (August, 1982) at the Savoy Theatre, London. No doubt about it, the audience leaves the theatre, indeed reels into the foyer after each act, in the state of happy elation described by Bentley. The complimentary quotations from the reviews do not exaggerate: “The audience were toppling over with joy” (Standard); “This is a great farce, one of the most ingenious things I have ever seen” (Sunday Times); “An audience that wouldn't be seen dead at a sex farce laughs its head off at this one” (Observer, making a somewhat dubious categorization). Frayn has found his answer to the problem confronting modern farce writers by turning to the theatre, one of the places where the tightest of disciplines must prevail, even though—or especially because—pleasure is the object. However trivial the piece, the players who are performing it must take rehearsals, deadlines, all the business of the stage with the same seriousness as if it were Shakespeare. “The show must go on” is a real categorical imperative. Farce requires the strictest discipline of all, so Frayn is playing a subtle game with form when he makes his farce out of the stage business of making a farce.

We are never to get beyond Act One, so the programme tells us: a rather uneasy discovery if one comes to the theatre knowing nothing about the play (it is not published as I write). The setting is the living-room of the Brents' country home, seen first, the programme tells us (it is an amusing joke in itself), at the Grand Theatre, Weston-super-Mare, then at the Theatre Royal, Goole, last at the Municipal Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees. The names tell their own tale (apologies to Weston-super-Mare!) of the company's expectations. The audience's too may be rather low as the curtain goes up on the standard lounge-hall set and a comic lady cleaner/housekeeper, Mrs. Clackett, played by Dotty Otley (after Stoppard?), comes on to do her comic business with a feather duster, a telephone and a cockney accent. She sketches in the situation (the Brents abroad, the house open to viewing by prospective tenants) and establishes some of the points round which the manic action will develop, including the most absurd of all, the plate of sardines which is always on Mrs. Clackett's mind and soon gets on to everybody else's; it is lost, found, trod on, lost again, and is altogether a splendid red herring. Having waved the comic cleaner cliché at us, Frayn then gives the piece a push in a modern direction that stretches well back into the past too. From Sheridan's The Critic to Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the “rehearsal” joke has been a sure-fire device for drawing the sort of laughter that allows for odd turns of thought about the nature of the theatrical illusion.

The voice from the auditorium that corrects Dotty's muddle and continually interrupts the action from then on brings us just to the fringe of the Pirandellian world. The hapless director, Lloyd Dallas, played with smooth accomplishment by Paul Eddington, is not unaware that he is in something like a Six Characters relationship with his cast, as his sardonic “explanations” of the play occasionally hint. But this is no more than the faintest of suggestions: Frayn's play has other fish to fry and little time left over from the comic business that accumulates at ever-increasing pace in the first act. The director's interruptions have a double function; funny in themselves, they help to fix the details of the business for the audience with a rather unusual exactness. We get to know almost as well as the actors the exact position of everything on the set; the four doors downstairs, four upstairs, and the places where the characters should be at any particular point. We are left free to register all this by the simple situation of Nothing On (the play under rehearsal). Basically, it is a mix-up of two couples, neither of them knowing that the other is in the house. The young man from the estate agents turns up with the dumb blond (obscurely connected with the Inland Revenue) for a swift assignation in the supposedly empty house he is passing off as his own. Hardly have they had time to find the right door and get her dress off, when the older couple, the real owners, arrive: not abroad, after all, but dodging the Inland Revenue. Stimulated by being secret visitors in their own house, they too seek a bedroom. “Off to bed, are you?” says Mrs. Clackett, with remarkable sang-froid, on being confronted with the employers she thought in Majorca (or was it Sardinia?). And from then on it is a game of hide-and-seek and near misses as couples race up and down the staircase, opening and shutting doors, finding objects in the wrong places, and becoming ever more perturbed by the poltergeist atmosphere in which things move apparently by magic, voices of unknown people are heard from behind doors, and the television takes off from its stand (with the aid of a superbly leisurely burglar). Even Dotty loses her aplomb at this—and her grip on the sardines.

But this is only the bare skeleton of a plot which is to be brought wonderfully alive by all the things that go wrong with it. In the rehearsal the troubles are technical: doorhandles stick, props are mislaid, the burglar not only fails to appear on cue but has to be sought throughout the theatre till he turns up, inquiring with bland alcoholic courtesy, “Have I missed the opening night?” This character—known only as Burglar in the Nothing On programme—becomes the best-known name in the company as the cry “Where is Selsdon?” rings round the house. The audience is being trained to recognize the danger spots where some of the funniest trouble is to develop later on—at such crazily high speed that we have to be as quick as the actors in our reactions if we are to follow the action and get the cream of the jokes. There will be no time, for instance, to explain why understudies are so quick to rush into the Burglar's costume, with the result that we become ridiculously over-provided with burglars in the third act. We have to grasp in the rehearsal the catastrophic unreliability which makes those improvised entrances oddly natural, though the result is so ludicrous. No one will be exempt from the chaos that comes dangerously close to triumphing in the following acts. Stage Manager Tim and ASM, Poppy Norton-Taylor, both hauled on to the stage in the rehearsal for the limited job of getting the technicals right, are to be completely swallowed up by the play, as indeed is the director, before the evening ends.

Another layer of comedy is provided by the relationship between the personalities of the actors and their stage roles. They are obviously type-cast. The jeune premier, suitably named Garry Lejeune (Nicky Henson, in fine form for all the acrobatics he is called on to perform), is impassioned and inarticulate in and out of his script: all his sentences seem to work up to climaxes that tail away in a dogged “You know.” The dumb blond concentrates on herself with a consistency which Rowena Roberts (playing Brooke Ashton playing Vicki) makes quite sublime. When she loses her contact lens and the whole company searches for it with exaggerated care (waves of sympathetic laughter for the lifted feet from an audience evidently familiar with the routine in life), she keeps her little-girl cool, only just remembering to tell them when she finds it—in her eye, inevitably. True to type, when pandemonium breaks out later, she simply continues with her routine whenever it proves possible; having mastered her part (no easy task for her, we guess), she goes on with it regardless.

There are intriguing gaps as well as affinities between the actors and the characters they play. The toothily smiling Mr. Brent, bounding on euphorically with Belinda in the much-rehearsed opening scene, turns out, as Freddy the actor, to be earnest and angst-ridden, always wanting rational explanations for the silly things he has to do in the plot. Why, he wants to know, does he have to take his parcels at one point into the study, what is the real reason for it? No good telling him they are needed there for the next scene; the director has to provide him with a Stanislavskyan “through line”; the character's attitude to parcels represents a need for security, the result of unsettling experiences in childhood. “Oh, thank you, Lloyd,” breathes the nervous actor, picking up his parcels with new heart.

It is Belinda who persuades the director to take pity on her stage husband, relating the trouble he is having with his wife in real life. She is the know-all of the company, asking “Didn't you know that?” sweetly as she breaks each new scandal. Jan Waters makes her a rather rounded personality: ironic, cool, urbane, a good contrast with the noisy, humorous, eccentric Dotty (robustly played by Patricia Routledge), who is to be her deadly real-life rival in the final act. By the end of the first act Belinda has let the cast into two secrets which provide impetus for much of what follows: Garry and Dotty are “you know” (a surprise to the audience, this, as well as to the actors, for as one of them says, she is old enough to be his—). And Brooke's stormy scene with the director is, so Belinda reveals, nothing but a rather sweet lovers' quarrel.

When the curtain comes down, the first act of Nothing On has been brought to a ludicrous climax by the appearance of a real prospective tenant, a sheikh in flowing robes who pronounces a benediction on the “House of Heavenly Peace.” This rather crude irony of the inner play is to acquire more interesting resonance from the complex patterns that have been forming during the rehearsal, with the actors' private lives cutting across the problems in the plot they are performing. The second act triumphantly demonstrates this intricate counterpointing. In a brilliant stroke of invention, which takes a tip from Beckett's Play as well as from Pirandello, Frayn gives us the first act of Nothing On all over again—with the crucial difference that it is being done “for real.” Another audience is located somewhere out there at the very back of the stage, beyond the footlights which the audience at the Savoy glimpses from time to time as “our” actors go through the play for the unseen audience.

The emphasis shifts now to the actors' private lives. Panic reigns by the call-board and the stairs leading to the stage house (seen from behind to be nothing but doors and platform). Temperament is raging. Tongue-tied emotional Garry has developed a furious jealousy of Freddy, whom he suspects of intentions on Dotty, who in her turn is enraged and threatening not to go on. Not a serious threat, this, for she has money in the show, as the director (returned incognito for the opening from his other production in London) sardonically points out. By the end of the act we learn that Poppy is pregnant by this Lothario. “I didn't know that,” says Belinda, raising a human laugh after the more manic glee of the farce at its wildest. The amorous tensions and confusions are exacerbated by every trivial event, including the bouquet which gets handed around to the wrong persons, and the general insecurity is heightened in the usual way by the unreliable comings and goings of Selsdon and the whisky bottle for which they can never find a hiding-place that he will not find. Through all this torrid backstage drama, Poppy is cooing at intervals into the public-address system, “Ladies and gentlemen, will you kindly take your seats. The curtain will go up in three minutes,” advice the Stage Manager repeats with different timing, unaware that she has been before him: a very funny sequence, which has the effect, so the director bitterly informs them, of making terrible trouble for the matinée audience of old-age pensioners, unsure whether or not they have time to visit the cloakroom.

The categorical imperative then comes into play. The curtain is really going up and now the sacred discipline of the theatre prevails: nothing must bring the performance to a halt. The actors' private drama continues, but—here Frayn is at the top of his invention—always in total silence. A wonderful mime is performed, synchronized with the action of the inner play with staggering dexterity. The tensions between the actors are acted out as in an early Charlie Chaplin film through expressive looks, gestures, professional bits of miming, bodily attacks narrowly averted, fiendish practical jokes like tying trouser legs together (Garry Lejeune is the victim of this one). Actors dash on to the backstage area, taking their chances to tread on a rival's hand or snatch up a weapon of defence before dashing back on stage in time to pick up their cues. Eccentric props substitute for the real ones. A hatchet appears (from the fire equipment?) to be ritualistically passed around without any seeming connection with anything. A cactus similarly appears, to be plucked ultimately from the director's posterior. The zaniness takes on a near surrealistic quality, not least in the way the routine of the inner play keeps going despite the anarchy the actors face each time they open a door, to find the wrong prop or person there or nothing where there should be something. Somehow they improvise, at a speed with which the audience has to work hard to keep up: slightly reduced levels of laughter in this act were surely due not to less mirth, but to the concentration needed to follow the dazzling, virtuoso mime and the intricate connections and near misses of the double plot.

Nothing On, amazingly, survives. The jeune premier makes his entrance on cue, even if he has to do it flat on his face, because of said practical joke with trousers. Other trousers fall, at an exhilarating rate, but the sky stays in place; the actors get to the curtain-fall. Then the backstage battle-lines are drawn up anew for the love-drama that is obviously going to continue among them between the acts.

How can Frayn follow the virtuosity of the second act, one wonders, returning after the interval to see Act One yet again. He had changes of thought about it himself (picking up suggestions from the audience), a reaction which seems right and proper for a farce which has such inspired improvisation built into it. Impressively, he escapes anticlimax by putting us into yet a new position; we are now the audience for whom the piece is being performed, as for the first time. We return to our seats, like the OAPs at Goole, to Poppy's cooing reminder that the curtain is about to go up. Then we see the so-familiar set, and the familiar actors appear in advanced stages of exhaustion, hysteria, inebriation. Dotty reels on, to collapse on her couch, snatching at the telephone with such abandon that she dislodges it, and the Brents on their first appearance have to make enormous efforts to get it back in place—or at least looking as if the wires might lead somewhere (like the action).

We watch with fascinated horror as the well-known lines and incidents blur and take on the manic quality of the feelings with which the actors are wrestling. The poltergeists are really in command now: Brooke's discarded dress acquires a mobility far beyond what it is supposed to have; the sardines are all over the place; we have not one burglar but three, at one point saying their lines in unison like a music-hall turn about to go into a dance routine. The director is one of them, his Olympian detachment gone, under the same pressure as the rest to improvise. He is their kind social worker, says Belinda, ad libbing brilliantly to account for his presence and remind him that he is “the man who tells us what to do.” It is the actors' revenge on God (hitherto inclined to keep at a safe distance in stalls or dress circle). And it is Poppy's triumph: in the white sheet, as one of the sheikhs (also multiplying like the burglars), she is suitably dressed for the wedding which it seems will be the Lothario's fate. Sweat dripping off them (the unlucky Lejeune has to take a tremendous tumble, much appreciated by the audience), wildly improvising or going through surviving bits of the routine like zombies, the actors maintain the play and end up with justifiable triumph on the right curtain-line, which incorrigibly claims the relevance of the irrelevant sardines.

The performance is an exhilarating test of us as well as the actors in the speed of adjustment it calls for—to pick up clues, spot rocks ahead, anticipate the need for improvisations, recognize the strange new shapes in which the Nothing On material presents itself. It is also humanly amusing, with its glances out to the ordinary little things, like dropped contact lenses, which the farce benevolently turns from a source of irritation to glorious fun.

The closeness of farce to ordinary life is a strong source of its appeal. How close it can be has been demonstrated even as Noises Off is running by the disasters that have struck Alan Ayckbourn's latest piece, Way Upstream, at the National Theatre. “Leaks scupper Ayckbourn launch,” announced the Times (18 August 1982), explaining why the previews and opening night had to be postponed. The “river,” a six-thousand-gallon fibreglass water-tank on which the boat was to float, sprang a leak, and the boat, a twenty-four-foot cabin cruiser, could not be made to move properly in the elaborate set.

“What a farce” seems the natural reaction to this. It would take a Frayn or an Ayckbourn, however, to draw a true farce out of that recalcitrant material of real life. Noises Off satisfies in the way of the best farces by allowing disorder such a seemingly free run while maintaining unshakeable order. Nothing On will always open—more or less on time! Frayn emerges in this latest play as a master of the form and Noises Off as a farce which proves—if we had doubted it—that the tradition remains unshaken.