Theater Review: 'The Play That Goes Wrong'

David Cote of Time Out New York reviews "The Play That Goes Wrong."

Comedy, as everyone knows, is subjective. What one person finds hilarious another finds a crushing bore. So I fully expect the British import "The Play That Goes Wrong" to divide audiences. It's a machine that grinds out laugh after laugh using one simple premise: Amateur actors persevere in the face of disaster.

A group effort by Mischief Theatre, "The Play That Goes Wrong" is framed as an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery in an English country manor: corpse on the couch, detective, and everything. But the clueless director, cast and crew are thwarted constantly by jammed doors, props that break, missed lines and scenery falling to pieces. We watch the actors' idiotically dogged attempts to keep the scenes together, which only increases the chaos and absurdity.

Kudos to writers Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, doing double duty as a bombastic aristocrat, a whiny-voiced butler and the play’s increasingly crazed director/detective. There's a plot to the play-within-the-play, but don't worry if you can't follow it: That's the point.

Technically, the orchestration of sight gags and slapstick on Nigel Hook's brilliantly rigged set is highly impressive. But is it actually, y'know, funny? As a lover of British humor from Monty Python to "One Man, Two Guvnors," I have to say that an hour of this stunt is plenty for me. Cumulatively, it's farce on steroids, without any brains.

I'd be lying to say I laughed as much as the people around me. Glad they had a good time. Me, I need a little substance to ground the guffaws.