Noises Off - (Modern Plays) by Michael Frayn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

If we can just get through the play once tonight for doors and sardines. That's what it's all about. Doors and sardines. Getting on - getting off...that's farce. That's the theatre. That's life.

Michael Frayn's irresistible, multi-award-winning backstage farce Noises Off, enjoyed by millions of people worldwide since it premiered in 1982, has been hailed as one of the greatest British comedies ever written.

Winner of both Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Comedy, this celebrated play-within-a-play serves up a riotous double bill of comedic craft and dramatic skill. Hurtling along at breakneck speed it follows the backstage antics of a touring theatre company as they stumble through the dress-rehearsal at Weston-super-Mare, then on to a disastrous matinee at Ashton-under-Lyne, followed by a total meltdown in Stockton-on-Tees.

Frequently revived around the world, this new edition of the text was published to coincide with the acclaimed 2019 West End revival.

Review Quotes

"As finely worked as a Swiss watch and as funny as the human condition permits..the zigzag brilliance of the text as the clunky lines of the farce-within-a-farce rub against the sharp dialogue of reality." --Guardian

"A spot on parody..achieves an almost mathematical elegance as Frayn calculates all the many and varied ways in which it can all go wrong. Noises Off is cunningly structured." --Telegraph

"A classic farce and a fiendishly ingenious homage to the form . . . raucously delightful" --New York Times

"There has never been a more brilliantly conceived machine for helpless laughter than Michael Frayn's 1982 classic Noises Off...deliriously funny." --Independent

About the Author

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and read Russian, French and Moral Sciences (Philosophy) at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He began his career as a journalist on the Manchester Guardian and the Observer. His award-winning plays include Alphabetical Order, Make and Break and Noises Off, all of which received Best Comedy of the Year awards, while Benefactors was named Best Play of the Year. Two of his more recent plays, Copenhagen and Democracy, also won numerous awards (including, for Copenhagen, the Tony in New York and the Prix Molière in Paris). In 2006 Donkeys' Years was revived in the West End thirty years after its premiere and was followed in 2007 by The Crimson Hotel, at the Donmar, and by Afterlife, at the National Theatre, in 2008. Frayn has translated Chekhov's last four plays, dramatised a selection of his one-act plays and short stories under the title The Sneeze, and adapted his first, untitled play, as Wild Honey. Frayn's novels include Towards the End of the Morning (in the USA, Against Entropy), The Trick of It, A Landing on the Sun, Headlong and Spies. His most recent books were a work of philosophy, The Human Touch, and Stage Directions, a collection of his writing on the theatre.