Playing ‘Noises Off’ the American Way

A number of critics in the United States--including Times reviewer Peter Rainer--have chivalrously leaped to defend me and my play “Noises Off” against Peter Bogdanovich’s film version of it (“Bogdanovich’s ‘Noises Off’ Is a Bit Off,” Calendar, March 20). I’m naturally grateful for their concern, but I feel a little as Br’er Rabbit might after being rescued by kindly animal lovers from the brier patch.

I liked the film. I couldn’t see for the life of me beforehand how such an inherently theatrical confection could be made to work in the cinema, but I think Bogdanovich has brought it off.

One of the things that my defenders have been defending me from is the Americanization of the original. The play-within-the-play, “Nothing On,” remains the dreadful British sex farce that it always was, but in the film it is being toured around the United States by a company of mostly American actors. “It can’t be done,” concludes one.

I think I was the one who first suggested this arrangement. It would be easier, I felt, for an American producer to set it up with the American cast, and it would be better if their struggles with British accents and style were part of the action. This policy seems to me to have paid off handsomely-- the film is most perfectly cast, with quite superlative comic actors.

There’s nothing inherently implausible about the idea of American actors performing a British play--they do it all the time. As a matter of fact, there was already a trans-Atlantic element in the original stage version, though no one has ever noticed it. The director of “Nothing On” as written is plainly (to my eyes, at any rate) an American. He’s never been cast or played as American, though, and curiously he remains solidly British in the film (Michael Caine). No one’s ever complained about this bit of Anglicizing.

Nor is there anything very unusual about shifting the locale of a play. With the classics nowadays, it’s even thought to be a slightly threadbare conceit to set them in the time and place specified by the playwright. Many of the stage productions of “Noises Off” around the world have localized the entire action. In France, for instance, it was set in France, with a French company touring a French farce.

No one, so far as I can recall, remarked upon it. And even where the British setting was retained, in any case, the local representation of Britishness often seemed a lot more outlandish to my eyes than anything foreign could do.

There’s also a lot to be said for increasing the distinction between the actors of “Noises Off” and the roles they are playing in “Nothing On.” In some countries, a difference of exactly this sort was introduced for its own sake. In Finland, “Nothing On” was an English import translated into standardized stage Finnish, and when the actors broke off their rehearsal they relapsed into provincial dialect. In Barcelona, a Catalan-speaking company was performing a commercial hit from Madrid written in Spanish.

By international standards, in fact, Bogdanovich takes rather few liberties with the text. The cast does not assemble to sing a Sardine Song, as in Rome. Carol Burnett does not perform a double high-kick before every exit, as her counterpart in Berlin did.

Only one adjustment to American usage caused me much anguish, and that was the requirement for a happy ending. My play ends at the point where the lamentable provincial tour of “Nothing On” has finally crumbled into chaos. In the minute or so left before the credits run at the end of the film, it was insisted by everyone involved that “Nothing On” had to become a success on Broadway.

I argued a good deal about this. I offered a dozen or so cinematic extrapolations of the final disaster. I favored one in which the stage manager/stand-in, rushing offstage to lower the curtain on the catastrophic last performance (in Cleveland in the film), trips over a stage weight and brings down part of the set, which shorts the lighting board. One electrical failure trips another, in a steady escalation of disaster until in a final helicopter shot we pull out to see district after district of Cleveland blacking out, and chaos spreading outward to engulf Ohio, the United States, the Western Hemisphere, mankind.

Peter Bogdanovich argued forcefully and intelligently back. The play had in effect ended happily in the theater, he suggested, when the real actors came out all smiles for their curtain calls. Then again, in a film the audience empathized much more with the characters. People felt cheated if they didn’t know what happened to them as individuals, and it was part of the aesthetic of popular cinema entertainment that things ended well.

I countered with the example of “Thelma & Louise,” where the protagonists end suspended by freeze-frame in a car way out over the Grand Canyon, with very little hope of touching down on Broadway.

It was no good. American audiences, I was assured, didn’t want to find they’d spent the last hour or two watching a bunch of losers.

But comedy, it seems to me, is by its very nature about losers. I once tried to escape from this discouraging philosophy and wrote a comedy about a man who was a born winner. In Britain it failed as comprehensively as its hero succeeded. I might try it in America.

The responses of the audience at previews suggested that the producers were right and perhaps this is the real Americanization that the piece has undergone.

Anyway, a debate of considerable intellectual seriousness was conducted on the matter of the ending, back and forth across the Atlantic, by phone and fax, to the profit of British Telecom and Pacific Bell if no one else. In the end I had to concede that “Nothing On” just possibly might have taken New York Times theater critic Frank Rich’s fancy, and made it on Broadway.

Nothing is certain in show business, after all. The most wretched enterprises sometimes touch the right nerve. Just as the most skillfully directed and played productions sometimes touch the wrong one.