IT WAS all a little confusing. I had entered the rehearsal room for the Michael Frayn comedy Noises Off, to be confronted by two directors. This was possibly only natural for a play that delights in creating all sorts of dotty situations backstage during the run of a theatrical farce. Just to explain: Philip Wilson is the real director of Noises Off, actor David Leonard is playing the role of a director in the comedy. All a little strange for real direc- tor Wilson? “Not at all”, he says, “not when you are dealing with someone as lovely as David . . .” Although the play opens at the Liverpool Playhouse tonight, rehearsals were taking place in a workshop at the Liverpool Everyman. The reason for this is Noises Off is a fiendishly difficult comedy to stage and, with the set still being built at the Playhouse when we met, the cast had gone to the workshop where a replica had been constructed to practice on. It was not as posh as the proper set designed by Mike Britten – all plywood and doors with room titles scribbled on them. The doors play an important part in the comedy. One of Frayn’s best-loved comedies – the American critic Frank Rich described Noises Off as “the funniest play written in my lifetime” – the three-act comedy is set around a touring theatre company’s production of a farce titled Nothing On. In the first act we watch a dress rehearsal of the first act of the fictional farce, while the second takes us backstage during a performance of the same act and the third is the same act seen at the end of a run when chaos is taking over. What makes it work is that the actors performing Nothing On are not only making mistakes, but their backstage carrying-on with each other is also having its effect. Real director Wilson says he is nothing like the fictional director in the play. “I like to think I am a very calm individual and Lloyd Dallas, the director in the play, gets very frustrated. Things are not going well, the actors have not learned their lines or moves.” Leonard, who has actually directed once (The Importance of Being Earnest a year ago), likes to think he does not behave like Lloyd Dallas, either. “I have to be careful as actors in the past say they have based performances on certain directors. But I think Michael Frayn has drawn an archetypal director, the sort you only see in films – fiery, bad-tempered, a bit annoying and Oxbridge-educated. When he left university, he probably thought things were going to happen but they have not taken off. He has spent years doing things like directing Shakespeare in the park or plays in Turkey.” It is unusual to know so much about a character, but the Playhouse programme will include biographies of the fictional performers involved in Nothing On. These include TV sitcom star Dolly (confusingly played by real sitcom actress Geraldine McNuly from My Hero), a drunken old trouper, nice but dumb Brooke and a host of other theatrical “types”. “The programme notes for Nothing On suggest some connection between the actors, so in some ways the recipe disaster is there,” says Wilson. For Wilson, the biggest challenge has been getting his cast to actually make mistakes. “The usual rehearsal process leads to a time when people do know their lines and everything works on time. But my company has to learn not only to get to that point and supposedly still be making mistakes, but remembering to make those mistakes!” It is doubly difficult for actors to do something incorrectly – on time, he points out. “There is a real pre- cision the company has to achieve, the play is technical and very physical, very demanding. There are many things the audience won't see to achieve this chaos.” Leonard will be as energetic as anyone else – and wearing spectacles. “They are always a useful prop,” he says. “You can take them off when exasperated and peer at people through them.” The fictional farce, says Leonard, is typical of the trouser-dropping type in which a young man takes a young lady to a house that is not his for “an afternoon of enjoyment”. But the housekeeper he thought was out isn't and the couple who own the house make an unexpected return. It sounds funny but, alas, we only ever see the first act. But, as Leonard explains, the play is about two farces, the one on stage and the other backstage. Asked to describe farce, he says it is “highly physical, mathematical, very energetic and usually done to a formula.” Frayn’s farce is certainly that. NOISES Off opens with previews at the Liverpool Playhouse tonight and runs until June 30. | 
