Reading Response to Frayn's "Noises Off"

There are a number of motifs that are common in nearly every farce that has been written since the form was first created. These include motifs of miscommunication, mistaken identity, and misplaced items of importance, just to name a few. And while Michael Frayn’s brilliant comedy Noises Off has all of these motifs, there is another one that is a bit more specific to this script. Frayn includes the motif of the “real” world intruding into the world of the play within a play as a way of adding a level of complexity that many farces tend to lack. For example, Selsdon’s senility and poor drinking habits affect his performance in Nothing On just as the quarrel between the feuding lovers, Dotty and Garry, must be prevented from manifesting itself onstage in the form of Garry sabotaging Freddy’s own performance. Act II in particular shows that the dividing line between the “real” world and the world of Nothing On is tenuous at best as the actors struggle to get all of their cues right while maintaining peace between one another backstage.

An appropriate unifying principle for Noises Off would be "Curtain!" or bring the curtain down. Each act ends with Lloyd begging for Poppy to bring the curtain down on the show so that the act may end and the barrier between the two worlds of the play can be reestablished. Once the curtain is down, the actors can return to the “real” world conflicts without having to worry about whether or not the show will quite literally fall apart around them. Each act, then, is a desperate struggle to reach Selsdon’s final tagline (IF he remembers it) so that the cast can return to their own lives. In this way, Noises Off shows how a play rarely exists as its own self-contained world. The relationships between the actors and crew and their own conflicts and personal struggles often make their way onto the stage no matter how strong the wall between the real world and the world of the play may be.