Tick of approval for the play where everything goes wrong

REVIEW
by SHELBY BROOKS

The Play That Goes Wrong, a show where in fact everything does go wrong, travels to Adelaide today after leaving Melbourne audiences in stitches for the past month.

The heavily hyped  UK comedy production – Best New Comedy at the Olivier Awards in 2015 – had stiff competition in Melbourne against popular musicals Kinky Boots and Book of Mormon. 

But it had its audience already laughing before the lights even dimmed.

Cast members acting as ushers and front of house staff ran around the stalls interacting with audience members. One man was even brought on stage to help fix a broken piece of set, which perfectly established what the audience could expect for the next two hours.

The premise of the show is that in live theatre, mistakes are often unavoidable.

Every performer, regardless of their experience, has stories to share about the time that someone fell over on stage, or when the backstage crew forgot to bring the set in on time.

Similarly, anyone who has ever watched a stage show has probably noticed something that hasn’t quite gone according to script.

Sometimes the (unintentionally) funniest and most enjoyable parts of a show are the panicked looks or stifled chuckles of cast members when things don’t go how they were rehearsed.

The Play That Goes Wrong takes those unplanned moments of live theatre to the extremes to entertain their audience.

The show begins by introducing the audience to the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, an amateur theatre group staging a 1920s murder mystery.

But this storyline is rather irrelevant as the play’s comedy is in the way everything that can go wrong, does.

The eight-person cast was determined to continue their murder mystery despite misplaced props, forgotten lines, late audio cues and unwell lead actors.

And while these challenges would be any actor’s worst nightmare, they were the milder disasters of the evening.

The cast’s looks of panic and terror when things weren’t going to plan had the audience in stitches, and their rather silly solutions to their dilemmas were hilarious.

The cast performed without body microphones, and while their projection and diction were mostly strong, the physical demands of the show meant some dialogue was lost.

Some of the comedic sequences also seemed to drag on for too long, particularly when actors were in awkward predicaments that saw them struggling to move from their positions.

But all the actors, particularly James Marlowe as Max, and Nick Simpson-Deeks as Chris, acted outrageously, their work beautifully highlighted in the show’s crescendo: a brilliant and complicated disaster.

The show met expectations and left the audience feeling weak from laughing too much –the greatest achievement any comedy show can be awarded.

The Play That Goes Wrong is touring Australia until June.