Noises Off

I think great motif for Michael Frayn's Noises Off would be the old adage of Murphy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." In this farce, we see what is supposed to be a normal production start spiraling out of control, from something as minor as Brooke losing her contact to the multiple love triangles that end up completely unending a performance. Almost at every turn, something that should just happen naturally and melodically turns into a complete disaster. And while it's a given that all productions would have some sort of mess up or accident (such as I once stepped on a fellow actor's prop glasses after having problems with my own contacts right before the lights went up), this one shows Murphy's Law to the extreme. Frayn has the actors miss lines, skip queues, have wardrobe malfunctions, and completely allow their personal problems to bleed out into the production that ends with them having to drag the curtain down.

I think a great tag line would be the line Lloyd says in the first act. “That’s farce. That’s the theatre. That’s life!” Not only because the play itself is a farce, but it this play shows what can go wrong in a production, and that the key is that this is life, and with life, you just have to go on. That things will go crazy and chaotic, and you just have to accept it and move on. Just because they are putting up a production, doesn’t mean life has stopped. The actors can try to put aside their emotions and their problems, but they are but human, and can only go so far. And though they allowed their personal problems to bleed into their performance, none of them actually stopped trying to put it on. And that what being in theatre involves, to keep on going even though you messed up.