I hate to be a habitual dissenter regarding all these celebrated British imports—but I'm afraid Noises Off failed to get my pulse racing…. Watching this carefully manufactured laugh machine was like spending three hours staring into the works of a very expensive, very complicated Swiss clock—impressive workmanship, but for how long can one look at revolving wheels, moon disks, and star dials?…

I seem to remember that Lewis Mumford once declared the clock to be the key machine of the modern age, so maybe Noises Off represents the theatrical future—a time when instruments of stage precision will have replaced our more untidy dramatic endeavors. It is certainly more akin to engineering than to playwriting, directing, or acting; even the laughs issuing from the throats of the audience sounded mechanical to me. Ah, you may ask, why can't this sourpuss just sit back and enjoy an innocent little farce without injecting his morbid social generalizations? Well, the truth is I love farces—but ones that involve another dimension than efficiency, and more motor actions than slamming doors and falling down stairs. Farce may be a mechanism, but it is a mechanism rooted in behavior, however exaggerated. When Charlie Chaplin, in Modern Times, takes a break from the production line and continues to act like a machine, we laugh because of the contrast with his normal mode of being, just as Feydeau's indiscreet husbands amuse us by their convincingly agonized efforts to avoid exposure by their wives. But the characters in Noises Off—nincompoop actors from an incompetent British touring company—display little in the way of credible human reality. They are merely impulses in a laugh track….

The backstage ambience of the play, where the company continues to rehearse and perform an inane English farce while engaged in fits of temperament, bouts of drunkenness, and tantrums of jealousy, is obviously appealing to audiences—people usually love plays about the theater. It would be unfair to compare Frayn's treatment with that of such superior works about theater as Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise …, Molnar's The Play's the Thing …, or Mamet's A Life in the Theater …—but I can't resist observing that in those plays relationships are formed and broken because something is at stake. In Noises Off, nothing is at stake except the comic payoff—and nothing truthful emerges except the fact that actors, no matter how awful they feel or how badly they behave, somehow still manage to perform. "Getting the sardines on—getting the sardines off," says the play's director, "that's farce—that's theater—that's life." That's certainly what passes for farce, life, and theater in Noises Off. (p. 26)