The Play That Goes Wrong REVIEW: How can anything so wrong be so right?

The Play That Goes Wrong is the biggest shambles I have ever seen.

Sets fall over, people fall over, and often at the same time. It is a catastrophic disaster which somehow happens at a dizzying dash and in agonising slow motion, both for those on stage and the rest of us struggling to breathe in the audience. I didnt just laugh continuously, I laughed so much I actually cried. And quite possibly hurt myself.

Celebrating its 4th birthday at the Duchess Theatre this week, the smash hit has gone from a tiny room over a pub to the West End, Broadway, tours in the US, New Zealand and Japan, and is currently playing in twelve countries.

Our anniversary audience was a mix of kids, London hipsters and OAPS with a random large group of Dutch students thrown in for good measure, and effortlessly proved that laughter is unequivocally universal. 

Awarded the 2014 Whatsonstage.com Best New Comedy, the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and a Tony award for the Broadway transfer, The Play That Goes Wrong is the best worst show in recent memory.

The play started its life at a London fringe venue with only four paying customers on opening night and has gone on to reduce over a million theatregoers to tears – some of them, no doubt, in sympathy for the physical and emotional agonies enacted on stage.

This isn’t high art or a profound meditation on modern sociopolitical ennui, it is a never ending bombardment of the oldest jokes and comedy cliches going. It is high farce, low farce and everything in between. I’m only relieved they didn’t throw in the kitchen sink or somebody really could have got hurt.

The Play That Goes Wrong is like Fawlty Towers meets Acorn Antiques meets Allo Allo with a giant dollop of Buster Keaton and Morecombe and Wise.

On stage (and from the moment you walk in the theatre) the fictional Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society is desperately trying to mount The Murder At Haversham Manor. From then on in, it is excruciating, agonising ritual public embarrassment as everything, but everything, goes tremendously, titanically wrong.

What makes it so glorious is that we are all in on the joke. We have all been there in varying (hopefully non-concussed) degrees of personal disaster. It’s like that moment when you are trying so hard to be brilliant but life throws one more banana peel. You can see it coming and you are powerless to stop it.  

The cast of eight throw themselves (literally) headfirst into the mounting mayhem. 

Katie Bernstein, Jason Callender, Edward Judge, Alastair Kirton, Edward Howells, Meg Mortell, Graeme Rooney and Patrick Warner are all uniformly excellent, although I did have a soft spot for Kirton’s eager beaver Max and Judge’s Robert. 

Dead bodies move, live bodies are stuffed in grandfather clocks and tossed out windows, understudies are pushed onstage and knocked unconscious, stage managers are pushed onstage and knocked…well, you get the picture.

It must be tremendously hard to get everything wrong so right. The timing and technical skills of the ludicrously talented cast is matched by a perfectly terrible set that become a ninth member of the cast by the time it too falls over and is knocked to pieces.

Lord knows we all need a laugh in these troubled times. Perhaps we could sent this lot in to fix the economy, politics, Brexit and the rest. If not, it’s a great idea for their next production (I’ll take 20 per cent). 

Please, please, please go and see this huge hilarious hunk of happiness. Just keep an eye out for the missing dog…

The Play That Goes Wrong is currently on at The Duchess Theatre, WC2B 5LA