How do I explain? The Play That Goes Wrong is The Murder at Haversham Manor which is a drama performed by a British touring company (The Cornley University Drama Society) and due to a series of predictable and unpredictable mishaps (the space larger and unfamiliar, the cast gets sick the night before) the production goes horribly, ridiculously awry. So (stay with me, here) the comedy at The Winspear is a play within a play, in which the actors play actors. And crew. I think. There are several ways to look at this. The previously mentioned problems are included in the program notes, so you might or might not know this going in. For those of you who don’t remember, Murphy’s Law predicted: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” This is just as good an explanation as any. Another might be to think of The Play that Goes Wrong as Frayn’s Noises Off without any backstory, to speak of.
Before the play even commence, two of the stage hands are out in the audience, shouting, searching for a dog that has, apparently, gotten loose. Next we notice the stage manager’ having trouble getting certain objects to stick to the wall, and stay there. At the show’s opening, a corpse is discovered on a sofa in the study, but they’re having trouble transporting it to another room. The door connecting the study to the rest of the manor keeps getting stuck. Sneaking around the parameters of the set or climbing through the window, only prove to be temporary solutions. One of the actors is knocked out, stone cold, so the stage manager must take over, working with script in hand. Snow is evoked with a careless toss of enormous flakes that are not even remotely convincing. At one point, “Chris Bean” who plays “Inspector Carter” implores the audience to “stop laughing at us” (this is, after all, a murder mystery). Which only makes us laugh all the harder.
The simple reason The Play That Goes Wrong succeeds so phenomenally, is the mad-genius script (by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields) with so many intentional problems, accidents and acts of God, minute to enormous. The mishaps are the plot! The cast’s dogged determination to soldier on is what keeps the action moving. No rational troupe would push back at such miserable misfortune for more than an hour, refusing to accept defeat. Please forgive the cliche here, but just when you think nothing else can go south, it most assuredly does. Lewis, Sayer and Shields have booked us passage on a ship that sinks for a very long time. Yet it remains animated and surprisingly punchy. I mean, it’s pretty much a one-gag show: 99% slapstick, like the poor salesman who doesn’t realize the dog doesn’t belong to the kid on the stoop. If only the poor “cast” of The Play That Goes Wrong could figure out that they’re doomed from the start, they might leave early. Thank God they don’t. And neither do we.
AT&T Performing Arts Center presents The Play That Goes Wrong, playing July 11th-16th, 2019. Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St, Dallas, Texas 75201. 214-880-0202. www.attpac.org