Profound and blissfully funny, Frayn’s farce is as fresh as ever

Noises Off Phoenix Theatre, WC2 ★★★★✩

FORTY-ONE years on, Michael Frayn’s peerless farce-within-a-farce is still leaves an audience breathless with laughter, even though it’s long outlived the sex comedies it set out to spoof in 1982. It’s meticulously plotted, remorselessly funny, and always feels fresh: last night, the jokes about tax dodging landed particularly soundly.

Lindsay Posner’s revival features precisely the kind of starry allsorts — Felicity Kendal, Matthew Kelly, Alexander Hanson — who might have taken a trouser-dropping entertainment out on the road in the Sixties or Seventies. It’s slow in the first act, when the troupe of vain and needy thesps stumble through rehearsals of a dire farce called Nothing On.

But it gathers impetus in the sublime second act, when we witness jealousies and weaknesses wreaking silent backstage havoc on the production; and the third, when we watch the show fall apart. It is infused with a wry affection for actors and theatre lore. It’s also subtly profound, exploring the existential desperation that comes when you realise no-one’s in control. But mostly Noises Off just blissfully, brilliantly funny. Kendal is well cast, if slightly OTT, as ageing sitcom darling Dotty Otley. Joseph Millson bears the heroic brunt of the physical comedy as her toyboy lover and co-star Gary Lejeune.

Each time I watch this play I’m awed yet again by the way a new ensemble has mastered a fiendishly complex piece of stagecraft. Minor niggles aside, Frayn’s comic classic seems to be bulletproof. Hats — and trousers — off to him.

• To March 11, atgtickets.com