This revival of Michael Frayn's farce to end all farces was extravagantly garlanded when it first opened at the Old Vic. With two Olivier award nominations safely in the bag, its transfer from South Bank to West End was surely only a matter of time.
Noises Off, though, is much more than a straightforward rib-tickler, both savvier and savager than the other theatreland farces currently on offer, Richard Bean's One Man, Two Guvnors and Graham Linehan's rampantly successful update of The Ladykillers: a virtuoso tightrope act that generates comedy from our fear of the abyss.
As we follow a troupe of actors touring a geriatric sex comedy (winkingly called Nothing On) through flyblown regional theatres, observing from a variety of angles as the on-stage action is overwhelmed by real-life pratfalls, it becomes less a voyage of dramatic discovery than a penitential progress. It's genuinely hard to work out if the play is a tribute to thespians keeping calm and carrying on (or off), or a forensic dissection of the limitations of theatre.
Lindsay Posner's production is a feat of technical brilliance that hasn't sagged in the least since I saw it three and a half months ago, but neither (despite two new cast members) has it much changed: finely tuned, superbly crafted, but a thing of mechanical precision rather than wild laughter. It's at its most rewarding in the second act, a ballet of backstage chaos whose astonishing intricacy – a blur of errant props, mistimed cues and acts of silent revenge – would not have disgraced Merce Cunningham.
The cast remains uneven. Robert Glenister seems to have reached the end of the road as the vulpine, bullying director, and Jamie Glover, not a natural comedian, has yet to discover self-irony as a leading man frustrated in love. But Lucy Briggs-Owen (taking over from Amy Nuttall) offers doe-eyed pathos as the female lead whose attention span is as unreliable as her contact lenses, while Celia Imrie's tragicomic charwoman has, if anything, become more absorbing to watch: a glorious confection of precarious ego and incipient dementia. When she cries out, "I leave the sardines?" she somehow gives the line a riddling philosophical resonance worthy of Beckett.
