The Play That Goes Wrong – Duchess Theatre Review

★★★★★

Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong is a masterclass in choreographed chaos. Twelve years later, it remains a five-star farce, thanks to a company that finds wonderfully fresh shades of panic inside Cornley’s well-worn theatrical nightmare. How does a production that has fallen apart for more than 4500 performances still feel so gloriously alive?

The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society is performing The Murder at Haversham Manor, a 1920s country-house whodunnit in which Charles Haversham has been discovered dead and Inspector Carter must identify his killer. Unfortunately, the cast can barely keep the dialogue, scenery or one another upright long enough to investigate. Every attempt to rescue the performance creates an even bigger disaster.

The trouble begins before the opening speech. The mantelpiece needs fixing and a frantic search for Wilson, the missing dog, spills into the bar. By the time Chris Bean introduces the production, Cornley’s over-confidence has already become the evening’s joke. Mischief’s cleverest trick, though, is refusing to let the fictional performers acknowledge how hopeless they truly are. They persist, with increasingly desperate dignity, and that sincerity is where the best laughs live.

I was fortunate enough to speak with the cast before the show about performing farce for some upcoming social media videos. Their insistence that Cornley’s characters must remain truthful, rather than play for laughs, was immediately apparent onstage. A quick look between colleagues, a fractional pause before someone decides to carry on, or a repeated line that traps the whole cast in a verbal loop can be just as funny as a large-scale collapse. The apparent chaos is like an intricately choreographed dance, and everybody needs to know their steps.

Henry Shields originally made Chris Bean a crisp perfectionist slowly unravelling under pressure. Matthew Spencer’s Chris feels more like a longtime amateur dramatics veteran who has finally been entrusted with directing; his growing irritation carries the sting of a cherished opportunity slipping through his fingers. Raphael Bushay wisely avoids imitating Henry Lewis’s formidable stage presence. Bushay’s Robert is determined to succeed, and the increasingly strained confidence behind his composure gives each fresh indignity a wonderfully human edge.

Alex Bird finds a lovely variation in Dennis. Rather than treating his mistakes as simple ineptitude, Bird suggests a man hopelessly out of his depth and desperate not to disappoint Chris, making every forgotten line feel personal. Harry Al-Adwani’s Max revels in the audience’s attention, creating an entirely different kind of trouble. These competing impulses make the ensemble a recognisable amateur company, held together by affection, ego and a frankly heroic refusal to stop.

Nigel Hook’s ingenious manor-house set is almost a ninth performer. Its doors, fireplace and upper level become increasingly unreliable, but every apparently accidental mishap demands precision from the people making it happen. The timing of a lighting cue, the intervention of a sound effect and the positioning of an actor during a collapsing scenic sequence are all part of the same comic machine. Michela Brennan, Michael Clark and the entire backstage company deserve enormous credit: their invisible coordination makes Cornley’s spectacular incompetence possible.

The current cast is refreshing, finding new moments of joy in the script and its larger-than-life characters. And there is real pleasure in a family comedy that earns this much laughter without relying on swearing or vulgarity. The ten-year-old beside me summed up this show better than any review I could ever write by announcing, “This is the best play ever seen.” 

Twelve years in, The Play That Goes Wrong remains one of the most joyful demonstrations of how demanding great comedy can be. Its success belongs equally to the actors we applaud and the skilled backstage team we scarcely see. Bring the family, bring somebody who claims they don’t like theatre, and prepare to laugh at people trying very hard to be serious. For a show designed to go wrong, it gets an extraordinary amount right.