The Play That Goes Wrong @ The Kings

It’s in a play that goes wrong where everything goes precisely to plan. No detail of this melodramatic masterpiece was left to chance. The stage is carefully crafted and set so that each prop will play to some purpose, and each event will eventually be called back in some farcical manner. This laugh-a-minute whimsical whodunit pastiche – a play within a play – excels in the art of self-reference and foreshadowing.

Above all The Play That Goes Wrong is a feat of direction. The story goes that Cornley Polytechnic theatre society, after budget cuts led them to produce Chekhov’s “cut down” Two Sisters, have chosen to put on a play requiring a more suitable cast size: The Agatha Christie-eque Murder at Haversham Manor. Sadly (or to much delight) polytechnic have once again bitten off more than they can chew as they attempt to cope with the demands of the play.

No cliché is spared in this slapstick satire, but to have everything go so disastrously wrong with deliberation is no mean feat. Character speak their lines in the wrong order, misplace props that are later needed, have to hold up bits of sets with their faces, appear naked behind windows that are not meant to be open, take the wrong stage directions; leading them to be hit in the face with doors and knocked unconscious, and all of this carefully executed so as to set up future predicaments where other cast members have to play their roles while thinking on their feet.

While the play begins with some well-scripted laughs, the interest begins to really heat up towards the end of the first curtain. From this point on the labyrinthine interchanges of the plot continue to climax in clever complexity to satisfying payoffs. The final act is absolute chaos leading to a Buster Keaton-esque collapse of the set around the players who are placed just so they come through the windows and doorframes unharmed. A wonder.