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Noises Off.
Adelaide actor Annie Maynard says she still finds 'Noises Off',
a State Theatre production of a Michael Frayn play she is currently
involved in, as funny as when she began intensively studying
it over a month ago.
"That's a good test because generally [after] the first two weeks you all crack up and you think you're hilarious, but by the third week you're over it," she says, about to head off to another demanding but frolicsome day of rehearsal.
Audiences around the world appear to agree with Maynard on the wit of 'Noises Off' which has been playing regularly since its 1982 inception in London and even finding its way to German speaking audiences.
Maynard graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney last year and since has performed in several productions including State Theatre's wonderful staging of 'The Government Inspector' and two plays for Downstairs Belvoir. But she considers 'Noises Off' among her most "exhausting and demanding" roles.
Michael Frayn, the English writer renowned for the Tony Award winning 1998 play 'Copenhagen' reportedly took around a decade to write the relatively complicated 'Noises Off'.
Divided into three acts it is, as the French say, a 'mise en abyme' (story within a story), following the relational circus of a calamitous repertory theatre group as it tours the frivolous sex comedy 'Nothing On'. Anarchy is constant, with flying sardines reportedly among the more temperate elements of the havoc.
"The opening act involves the actors doing their final dress rehearsal before opening night," says Maynard. "In the second act the backstage is facing the audience. It's six weeks into the run and relationships are starting to fall apart and things are starting to go wrong."
In the final act the stage revolves frontward to show the group's performance, and the situation, Maynard says, has "disintegrated even further". Complexities arising from such structural convolution are, as Maynard points out, amplified by the farcical nature of the comedy.
"Generally a farce is quite technical in terms of entrances and exits, doorways and multiple changes, and you have to really nail the delivery and the timing of it.
"But this is about a group of actors putting on a farce, and then what's happening backstage becomes a farce in itself - it's two farces in one."
Maynard emphasises that it is hard to judge how successful a comedy is before presentation to an audience, which leads her to conclude that "the audience is an essential character in the piece". But she remains confident of the quality and humour of the production largely because of her and her colleagues' persistent laughter in rehearsal and the real risk they run of 'corpsing' (inopportune laughter during performance).
Another guarantor of quality, and one that Maynard is especially grateful for, is Frayn's writing. "Michael Frayn is the same playwright who wrote 'Copenhagen', one of the most dense, scientific plays of our time, so this is not just a flippant comedy," Maynard says with conviction. "It is really well honed, poetic writing which gives the actors a wonderful base to work from; [hence] you know that you are backed up by writing which is of the highest quality."
Directing the affray is State Theatre's artistic director Adam Cook, responsible for several of the company's other 2005 productions including 'The Daylight Atheist' and 'The Government Inspector', and who has directed 'Noises Off' before. Maynard, who worked with him at NIDA and in '...Inspector' earlier this year, has only praise for Cook, noting he permits the actors "to play a lot", making for a great deal of "fun in rehearsals" and also providing an additional means of trialling and refining the humour.
"He's wonderful to work with and he's very good at comedy; he's got a really good ear for it, and he knows how to really nail something and make it funny."
Maynard is accompanied on stage by a relatively large South Australian cast including Dennis Olsen, Michael Habib, Bridget Walters and Caroline Mignone, among others. Maynard says comedy is "always fun" because "you enjoy each others' work", and thus her experiences with her fellow cast members have been "wonderful". The ultimate concoction, Maynard says, is a "far-reaching comedy which will have something for most age ranges and demographics."
Wil McGinley
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'Noises Off' plays at The Playhouse until Sat 19 Nov.
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