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Roy Baker

Caught in the act: Alix Ah-Pet and Roy Baker during rehearsal for Noises Off

If any play can insist on being counted among the funniest and most successful of late twentieth-century comedies, it’s Noises Off. Originally conceived by London playwright Michael Frayn in the 1970s, its appeal has proved enduring and universal, staged thousands of times in many languages worldwide. Next month it reaches Scotland Island, with a cast and crew drawn from the offshore community. Tickets are on sale now: see below for details.

How to sell it to you? Well, it’s funny. Undeniably funny. I fell in love with it straight away, seeing in it the frenetic energy of Fawlty Towers, surely the apotheosis of late twentieth-century British comedy. They date from the same era, and both are rooted in the well-tested tropes of English farce: escalating chaos and implausible misunderstandings. But, like John Cleese and Connie Booth, Frayn revivified and extended the genre. There’s nothing elitist about Nothing On: you’ll get your fill of pratfalls and enough trousers-round-ankles ribaldry to shock any English country vicar. But, like Fawlty Towers, Noises Off achieves so much more.

Getting too friendly? Biba Farnea and Jess McGowan rehearsing a scene from Noises Off

Much of Fawlty Towers' success comes from the quality of writing; most of us can quote at least one line, even if it's only 'Don't mention the war'. Then there are the characterisations, such as the hapless waiter Manuel. Frayn's characters are equally enduring, and he serves up the same verbal dexterity, but this time it's sardines with plenty of sauce and a generous portion of word salad.

Frayn’s central preoccupation is with the illusion of human control. As a species we’re a hubristic lot, not least theatre directors. Think you can corral a difficult cast into a comedy engineered for mechanical precision? Think again. Actors have frailties: Noises Off is a study in how they cope – and collapse – under stress. Live theatre always teeters on the brink of chaos. Isn’t that part of the appeal? We go along wondering whether something will go wrong. And on Scotland Island it usually does. 

Noises Off does for live performance what bloopers and gag reels did for cinema: we all enjoy a bit of a disaster – preferably someone else’s. But Noises Off does a lot more than demonstrate the diablerie of props, sets, fellow actors and maddeningly complex scripts. As one critic puts it, Frayn, a man of both comic and philosophical genius, ‘disrupts the idea of a discoverable truth’. How so?

Nettie Lodge and Sophie Lepowic return to the island stage in Noises Off

Noises Off is a play within a play, a structure that invites us to consider what’s real and what isn’t. Usually we think of what happens on stage as performance and everything else as real. But, done well, the device leads to a mental jolt, a moment of disorientation, when we realise we are losing the distinction between performance and reality.

For my money, that jolt is delivered most elegantly in Sam Holcroft's recent play A Mirror, as well as Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, but it's found too in better-known works such as Sixth Sense and The Others. In those we discover who is really dead. Given that all of these are works of fiction, in which version of reality are they dead?  

The reality of offshore life often strays into the unreal, even surreal. So what better than Noises Off on the island stage? You might even start believing we're not bad actors, rather just pretending. A garbled line? It’s in the script. A mistimed entrance? No, that was deliberate. What better cloak for incompetence than performative intention? After all, isn’t that what most of us spend our lives doing?

Men's Shed volunteers John Travers and Steve Valenti working on the set

For tickets, click here

All brigade members are encouraged to attend this year's AGM, which will celebrate the brigade's achievements over the course of the last year and elect field and administrative officers for the year to come.

Further details, as well as an opportunity to register, will be made available closer to the time.

Annual subscription:
The 2025-26 membership fee of $20 (life members exempt) was due by August 2025.

If you are overdue with payment please pay it as soon as possible. The brigade bank details are as follows:

Account name: Scotland Island Rural Fire Brigade
BSB: 082 294
Account: 509351401

Ordinary members of the brigade voting in the election of field or administrative officers must have paid their 2025-26 subscription fee (unless a life member). If 2025-26 membership fees remain unpaid at the time of the AGM then membership of the brigade may lapse. 

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Text Leisa on 0418 619760 for more info.

Volunteer Editor: Roy Baker

Supported by: Scotland Island Residents Association