I Don't Want To Be Wrong

The Play That Goes Wrong has been running in London since 2012, ran two years on Broadway and is being performed around the world. When I recently saw it out here in Los Angeles, the audience was having a great time, laughing, whooping, applauding.  I found the whole thing dispiriting.

The title should have warned me away.  It says it all.  It's about a fictional troupe putting on a fictional mystery entitled The Murder At Haversham Manor.  I guess I don't see the point.  Why put on a fake play just so it can fail?

Actors love playing bad actors in lousy productions.  I've seen it in countless movies and plays.  And while it can work as part of a larger story, a whole night of it and nothing else gets tiresome quickly.

The cast of The Play That Goes Wrong portray the actors in the troupe as well as the stagehands.  In fact, before the play officially begins, the stagehands are seen trying to prepare the set (and failing).  Meanwhile, one was in the audience asking people if they'd seen a dog that was on the loose.  I hate that kind of stuff--please try get us involved through how well you do the show on stage, not by bothering us in the audience.

Anyway, the play soon begins and things fall apart immediately.  But we don't really know the characters.  I don't mean the "characters" in The Murder At Haversham Manor, who are negligible, but the actors in the troupe playing these roles.  While we get some glimpses of them as people beyond the show within the show, it's not much.

So we barely know them.  Why should we care if their play is failing?  And the murder mystery itself is nothing approaching a real play.  If it were put on without all the mistakes, it would be terrible--actually nonsensical.  It's designed not to work dramatically in any way, only to be funny (allegedly) in the context of the play being a disaster.

To give an example--and the evening offers nothing but examples--one character asks for a scotch.  Because the actual bottle of fake scotch has been mistakenly emptied, a stage hand supplies some fluid which happens to be corrosive.  So the actor drinks it and spits it out.  This I could see, but the gag is milked beyond belief.  Over and over the characters in the murder mystery drink scotch, though there's never a good dramatic reason for them to do so.  Worse, why would the actors in the troupe put up with this?  Even assuming they couldn't somehow rustle up something potable, why wouldn't the actor mime that he's pouring the scotch?  And why wouldn't the actors receiving glass after glass mime drinking it, rather than actually sipping it before spitting it out in disgust.

When things fail--props aren't ready, parts of the set fall apart, etc.--the actors "cover" by doing things that wouldn't fool anyone. No actor, even one in a failing show, would be stupid enough to do the sorts of things they do to allegedly make things better. Even in the most absurd farce, the characters have to believe in what they're doing, and make the audience believe.

There is a play that starts with a troupe in trouble and makes it work--Noises Off by Michael Frayn.  But that play is much better constructed. In the first act we watch a low-level troupe rehearsing a sex farce, so we get to know both the characters and how the play should work.  The second act, ingeniously, takes us backstage where a different farce is taking place while the sex farce is being played onstage. The third act shows us the set again, but things have fallen apart completely. (Admittedly, the third act can't compare to the brilliant second act.)

The actors in The Play That Goes Wrong did fine, professional work, and the set was cleverly designed to fall apart. But sorry, I don't get it.