‘NOISES OFF’ AND FRAYN ON FALSE FRONTS

“I was trying to invent a series of actions for nine characters: What happened backstage had to interlock with what happened front stage,” recalls playwright Michael Frayn. “Long before I finished, I’d given up all hope that anyone would ever perform it.”

The play was “Noises Off,” a comedy about the production of a sex farce, and they’re performing it all over the world. The play is well into its third year on the West End and is filling theaters from Japan to Argentina. Already a long-running hit on Broadway, “Noises Off” will open at the Ahmanson on Friday with Dorothy Loudon and other members of the original New York cast.

Frayn calls “Noises Off” a universal tale about the false fronts we all assume. At his understated office in suburban London, Frayn’s own front belies the success of a man with three hits currently on stage here. (His adaptation of Chekhov’s “Wild Honey” is doing brisk business at the National Theatre, and his Broadway-bound “Benefactors” recently won the 1984 Laurence Olivier Award for best play.)

A former journalist, Frayn, 51, is no time-waster. The hum of his electronic printer punctuates an afternoon meeting as he simultaneously serves tea, signs correspondence and routinely answers questions about his work. Before heading off for the theater that evening, he washes all the dishes from afternoon tea and mails the letters.

Frayn swears that he wasn’t even sure “Noises Off” was produceable, much less a blockbuster. All three acts pivot around the same scene from its play-within-a-play, and the second act features backstage couplings and uncouplings perfectly timed to the fact-paced front stage action. “I thought sometimes I would go crazy,” Frayn recalls. “I really couldn’t keep the whole thing in mind.”

During rehearsals, Frayn worried not only about whether the play would work but also about whether the actors would be able to remember all the moves. Director Michael Blakemore “kept wonderfully calm and cheerful,” Frayn recalls, “but each day we left the rehearsal hall I could see his face getting grayer and grayer.”

Frayn wrote so many endings for the piece during its initial run at the Lyric Hammersmith in suburban London, he says, that the cast finally “rebelled” and refused to learn another one.

When “Noises Off” opened in New York, Frayn rewrote the ending one more time and liked the new ending so much that he wrote it into the London production as well. He also did other rewrites, changing some of the distinctly British phrasing. (“Noises Off” is an abbreviation for “noises offstage.” Frayn chose it to interlock with “Nothing On,” the name of the sex farce being performed in the play.)

“Noises Off” sends an alcoholic actor, a philandering director and a sexy starlet rushing in and out of doors, windows and dilemmas, lamenting their own troubles, causing new ones and, Frayn adds, reminding us all of our own frailties.

His play “is not just about actors doing a play. It’s about the performance everyone does in life and about how sometimes it becomes very difficult to maintain that performance. Things come out from behind the woodwork either socially or psychologically; things emerge from the depths of one’s own psyche. I think this--the terror of not being able to continue--is at the back of most people’s minds, and people recognize it when they see it.”

Farce, he feels, is serious business. Its essential item is panic, “the losing of power for coherent thought under the pressure of events. What characters in farce do traditionally is try to recover some disaster that occurred, by a course of behavior that is so ill-judged that it makes it worse.

“In traditional farce, people are caught in a compromising situation, try to explain it with a lie and, when they get caught, have then to explain both the original situation and the lie. And, when they’re caught in that lie, they have to have another one.”

Frayn has been writing farces since the early ‘70s, returning to an interest in theater that he’d found less rewarding as a young man. His 1957 production for Cambridge’s Footlights May Week Revue was, he says, the only one that never got to London. His one acting experience, which occurred while he was studying Russian in the army, was even more discouraging: After his five-line speech (in Russian), the door jammed on his exit. Frayn couldn’t get off the stage, the audience started to clap, and, Frayn recalls, “I never went back.”

He turned instead to journalism, first as a reporter and columnist for the Guardian, then as a columnist for the Observer. (Five collections of his columns have been published over the years, among them Doubleday’s “The Day of the Dog,” which he once quipped sold “about six copies.”) Many of his columns mocked the theater--”my sensitive soul had been hurt” by the Cambridge experience--as he “resisted the desire in myself to write plays.”

He gave way in the late ‘60s. Producer Alexander Cohen was putting together an evening of one-acts in London. When Cohen eschewed Frayn’s play--Cohen disliked the changing of a baby’s diaper on stage, Frayn says--the playwright was so irritated that he wrote three more one-acts and bundled them together as “The Two of Us.”

“‘The Two of Us,’ which played Los Angeles’ Huntington Hartford in 1975, was what Frayn calls a “critical catastrophe.” But it was popular with the public. It also inspired “Noises Off.” Watching backstage as the play’s two actors scurried back and forth at one point to play five different parts, Frayn thought “that one day I must write a farce of a play seen from behind.”

His other plays include “Alphabetical Order,” recently seen at the Matrix Theatre in Los Angeles. Frayn tends to refer to these as “serious philosophical comedies” and to see himself most vividly as a philosopher-who-might-have-been. Woody Allen’s “Without Feathers” is perched on the edge of Frayn’s desk, but so are Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and two books on 20th-Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

One wonders when he has the time to read, given that he’s now at work on his sixth novel, just finished a screenplay and keeps busy as a Russian translator. His translations of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and Tolstoy’s “The Fruits of Enlightenment” were produced here in the late ‘70s. Due in April at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester is his translation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” His adaptation of Chekhov’s first play emerged as “Wild Honey” in a text that Frayn admits to having rewritten as extensively as if it were his own first draft.

Robert Fryer, artistic director of the Ahmanson, says that he hopes to bring “Wild Honey” to Los Angeles for the Ahmanson’s 1986-87 season. One of the original producers of “Noises Off” on Broadway, Fryer says that he and others also hope to bring Frayn’s “Benefactors” to Broadway in April “and, if it’s a hit, possibly later to either the Hartford or the Ahmanson.”

“Noises Off,” in turn, may itself make it to the screen. Frayn says that Steven Spielberg bought the film rights--he heard that Spielberg saw the play five times--”but I can’t begin to see how he’d make a film of it. It seems to me quintessentially something for the stage. If he does go ahead with it, I shall be very interested to see what happens.”