Noises Off
‘Many of the audience walked out, believing the deliberately ham acting was genuine incompetence’
DAVID GARRICK once said: ‘Any fool can play tragedy, but comedy, sir, is a damned serious business.’ Yet farce seems to be in another league; it was defined thus by the theatre critic and diarist James Agate: ‘Comedy is unreal people in real situations; farce is real people in unreal situations.’ In, Michael Frayn commented: ‘Everyday life has a very strong tendency towards farce… things go wrong… Often in a very complex and logically constructed way—one disaster leads to another, and the combination of two disasters leads to a third… the essence of classical farce: disaster building upon itself.’
