WHAT gives a play-staying power? The question came to mind when watching the 40th-anniversary production of Michael Frayn's Noises Off at London's Phoenix Theatre. I was seeing the play for the fifth or sixth time and yet I found myself laughing uproariously, as was the rest of the audience, at this gradual falling apart of a fictional British farce titled Nothing On. The kind of door-banging, trouser-dropping farce that Mr Frayn skilfully punctures may have gone out of fashion years ago, but we still delight in its disintegration. Why, exactly?
Most people know by now that in Noises Off we see a nightmare dress rehearsal of Nothing On, followed by a backstage perspective on a live performance and, finally, the show on the last leg of its provincial tour, but, as a wise critic once wrote, 'to narrate the plot of a farce is at best to decant Champagne'. The real reason Noises Off survives is because it is about something that even those of us who don't work in theatre can recognise: the fear that the order we seek to impose on existence will descend into chaos. I am not for a moment suggesting we come out of the theatre talking about the ideas, but there is a philosophical core to Noises Off that you don't find, for instance, in the hugely popular The Play That Goes Wrong, which simply glories in theatre's potential for disaster.
Denne historien er fra February 15, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra February 15, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
