Goodness knows we could all use a laugh at the end of a year that has been markedly low on mirth. This is where the continuing adventures of Mischief Theatre swoop in to help: the little company formed 11 years ago by three friends and fellow students at drama school in London is now an ever-expanding international phenomenon, powered by the overwhelming global popularity of The Play That Goes Wrong.
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What the company has achieved is no less than a reboot of the slapstick genre for the modern era, using the gift-that-keeps-on-giving conceit of a hapless amateur dramatics group constantly overreaching itself to disastrous, but highly comic, effect. The Play That Goes Wrong has now enjoyed productions in more than 30 countries worldwide, including a run of nearly two years on Broadway. It’s currently off on a major US tour, while the West End iteration is into its sixth year.
Yet Mischief’s ambitions do not stop at wreaking havoc in the theatre. Their reach is about to spread even further because of a new prime-time six-part BBC One series, The Goes Wrong Show, which is being excitedly touted as a ‘family-friendly comedy’. In today’s fragmented comedy landscape, when critically acclaimed programmes appeal to carefully delineated demographics, the hope is that The Goes Wrong Show, full of non-verbal gags and filmed in true throwback style before a live studio audience, will have that elusive across-the-age-ranges appeal, in the manner of fondly recalled programmes from a past golden age. There are considerable global ambitions for this work beyond its BBC One airing – the Chinese rights have already been sold.
Am-dram hijinks
It is The Play That Goes Wrong, written by Mischief’s founders and guiding creative lights Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, that has set the template, and acts as a guiding beacon for all of the company’s work. Originally a one-act piece of fringe theatre that dreamed big and made good, its premise is deceptively simple. Ill-equipped and under-rehearsed amateur actors struggle to stage a creaky Mousetrap-style country-house murder mystery, but are bedevilled by endless catastrophes of their own making and ineptitude, not least a set that collapses gradually but spectacularly around them. This is physical comedy done with a considerable degree of skill; as one review of the original West End production put it: “You have to be meticulous to make things look this chaotic”.
While Mischief Theatre has re-spun physical comedy-cum-slapstick for the modern era, they walk of course in the jaunty footsteps of hundreds of years of theatrical history. This brand of skilful messing about started in 16th-Century Italy with commedia dell’arte, which gave rise to the term ‘slapstick’ to describe a club-type object formed of two wooden slats. This noisy piece of equipment was used by performers for the purposes of general thwacking for comic effect and a genre was thus named. Commedia paved the way for the traditions of British pantomime – think of the messy chaos generated in the infamous ‘slop scene’ – and, influentially, music hall.
Mischief manage to combine slapstick and storytelling over a period and sustain it, which is very hard to do – Nica Burns
The likes of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel started their careers ‘on the halls’ and there is, consequently, much slapstick in the vintage era of black-and-white films, from Laurel and Hardy, the Keystone Cops and the Three Stooges. It is not difficult to trace the lineage of Rowan Atkinson’s silent clown Mr Bean back to this point. Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s classic comedy of overwrought actors and backstage antics, is another offshoot of this much-loved genre; it may not be a coincidence in this gloomy year that a revival of Noises Off is currently enjoying a successful West End run.
In short, audiences down the ages have always loved to watch things ‘go wrong’, which is why hopes are high that The Goes Wrong Show will go very right. Its additional appeal in a global marketplace is that it vaults any potentially tricky language barriers. A healthy chunk of audience members globally is sure to laugh at these half-hour doses of disaster, in a different but equally ill-fated genre each time, from the Cornley Drama Society, the same fictional company as The Play That Goes Wrong.
The first episode, The Spirit of Christmas, sees spiralling Christmas Eve shenanigans suffused with Mischief’s trademark scruffy low-fi vibe. A props mix-up leads to a family Christmas tree being decorated with sausages and topped with the turkey, before carefully hung stockings catch fire, elves get stuck up chimneys and an entire living room is wrecked as an increasingly inebriated Santa goes on the rampage. The script unravels too, especially in the second episode set in a Bletchley Park-type World War Two codebreaking centre, but one can, if one so desires, focus primarily on the physical. There are all sorts of deliberate howlers in the writing, but I chuckled the most when the very visibly bored actor playing Hitler keeps being glimpsed hanging around in background shots of Allied war work.
Theatre producer and owner Nica Burns has been a long-time supporter of Mischief’s work. “Mischief’s comedy is universal because it is centred on humans determinedly trying to achieve a goal which they fail to accomplish through misunderstanding, incompetence and, occasionally, misfortune. Let’s put on a play! How hard can this be? Mischief manage to combine slapstick and storytelling over a period and sustain it, which is very hard to do. Think how short many iconic Laurel and Hardy sketches are”, she says. “Mischief understand structure and how to orchestrate their gags and they have pushed their physical limits more and more as they have developed ever increasingly ambitious ideas. Running through this is a great affection for their characters, which creates an extraordinary good humour within an audience”. Burns concludes by pointing out that “none of Mischief’s success happened overnight. They really work at it and refine and refine”.
The future of Mischief
It will be fascinating to see where Mischief’s televisual exploits take them because, theatrically, the feeling is that they may be slightly – or perhaps temporarily – running out of steam. Their most recent West End show, Groan Ups, received a decidedly muted critical response, as it ditched the am-dram premise and forsook much of the physical humour in favour of a more expanded emotional terrain, tracking the fortunes of a group of school children from nursery to an (admittedly chaotic) adult class reunion. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the opening of Groan Ups meant that Mischief had a remarkable – and not sufficiently celebrated – three shows running concurrently in the West End; The Play continues to Go Wrong and there’s also The Comedy About a Bank Robbery. This is an incredible achievement for three guys who have only recently turned 30. And every new show is still powered by those original ‘three musketeers’ – Lewis, Sayer and Shields – and the actors they work with, including for the higher stakes of the television series, are still their team of colleagues from drama school. A picture in the programme for Groan Ups shows that almost all the principal cast members were part of the original Mischief line-up in 2008.
Groan Ups marked the start of a three-play, year-long Mischief residency at London’s Vaudeville Theatre; previewing now is Magic Goes Wrong, a work co-created with star US magic duo Penn and Teller in which a ‘hapless gang of magicians present a charity event’. It is very much to be hoped that there is greater rigour in evidence here; one of Mischief’s problems is that they have tended not to collaborate with theatre directors of sufficient clout or standing, who would encourage the close-knit ensemble to sharpen their focus and banish repetition and complacency. In this regard, the enhanced concision required for tightly structured, standalone 30-minute television episodes will work in their favour. After all, no one loves a gag that drags on too long.
It remains to be seen whether the staging of endless mishaps will eventually cause Mischief Theatre to run out of steam. How many things can conceivably Go Wrong? A quick glance back over the past 400 years of popular entertainment would seem to say with certitude: a lot.
The Goes Wrong Show starts on BBC One on 23 December. Magic Goes Wrong is booking at the Vaudeville Theatre, London to 31 May 2020.
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