Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Well, if it's good enough for Joanna Lumley it's good enough for us.
A pull quote from the great Lumley was above the entrance of the intimate Duchess Theatre in London's Covent Garden area.
She loved it . . . and wasn't wrong.
The Play That Goes Wrong opened in London more than a decade ago and since then has picked up numerous awards and played to packed theatres internationally.
But none of that really matters because – especially if you know nothing about it – the play is simply howlingly funny, even before it starts.
Conceived as a period piece drama – The Murder at Haversham Manor, presented by the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society – it is a kind of play wrapped around the murder mystery.
As the title tells us, nothing goes right for the cast and crew as props fail, people forget or accidentally repeat their lines, injury befalls some, the set starts to collapse and . . .
That is all you need to know.
The devil – devilish fun – is in the details.
The fun is also in that period setting because it needn't establish characters: we know the police inspector and others from previous encounters in the theatre, Agatha Christie and the small screen.
We're not there for the story – increasingly and to their increasing desperation nor are the hapless cast – but to watch the whole thing fall apart.
Which it does in unexpected ways.
The Play That Goes Wrong is a hilarious farce in which the cast run perilously close to physical injury as they valiantly try to get through the narrative in the face of disaster.
One of the directors has noted that if something goes awry from what the actors intended the audience would never know. It's all going awry even before the play starts.
Miss it as your peril, you won't laugh this much in a theatre ever again.
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The Play That Goes Wrong returns to New Zealand for a short season starting in Wellington April 19.
For dates and venues see here
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