Noises off Response
Noises Off is the perfect depiction of every director’s worst nightmare. It is the story of the production of a play called Nothing On. The director is frantically trying to pull the show together, but everything that you could possibly imagine goes wrong. Each performance of the show disintegrates more and more. By the end, the script has been all but completely abandoned and the actors are at each other’s throats while they stumble, quite literally, towards the end of the first act. While the horror of the endless mishaps and the actors’ incompetence is borderline anxiety producing, the timing, the running jokes throughout the script, and the actors’ embodiment of their dysfunctional characters, turn this disaster of a show into a hilarious comedy.
I found the movie slightly slow in the beginning as it laid out the premise of the show, Nothing On, the problems the director is experiencing with the cast, and most importantly, the distinct and exaggerated characteristics of each of the actors in the show. Much of the comedy arises from the ways in which their personalities affect the production and interact with each other. Dotty is a spacey red head who can never remember when to take the props off with her and when to leave them on stage. Frederick is sensitive man who gets nosebleeds from witnessing violence. Selsdon is a drunk who is always disappearing and never knows what is going one. Brooke is a dim-witted blonde who is always loosing her lenses. Garry never manages to fully express a single one of his thoughts. Belinda is the most level headed of the crew and attempts to look out for everyone. Tim and Poppy work back stage and are constantly running around in a frazzled state, exhausted from too many hours on their feet.
Although the laying out of these characters may not have been the most entertaining part of the film, the actor’s traits all added to the hilarity as the comedy continued. They created running jokes that became increasingly entertaining each time they surfaced. The actor’s personalities affect the production in countless ways. As the production falls apart, Brooke, unable to think on her feet, is incapable of improvising conversation with the rest of the cast. As the play continues to morph, she continues on with her lines although they no longer make any sense. The more Garry is required to improvise, the more his tendency to leave sentences unfinished emerges. As a result, the dialog between the two of them is complete nonsense. Selsdon, who plays a burglar, gets into a bottle whisky during the show and no one can find just before he is supposed to goes on. As a result both Lloyd and Tim plan to go on for him and there ends up being three burglars on the stage at onece. As a result of the fighting between the actors, Frederick is constantly holding off a nosebleed. Dotty constantly has the sardines in the wrong place and even absentmindedly brings the phone back stage while leaving the receiver. Throughout the chaos, Belinda is doing her best to keep the show moving, though to little avail. The scripting of these exaggerated characters was a fundamental aspect of the play’s comedy. The casting was equally important and each of the actors embodied the characters completely. Noises Off was a hysterical film that I truly enjoyed watching. The characters, the actors, and the endless disasters, came together to create a true masterpiece.
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