Campbell Rises to Challenge of ‘Noises’

Is it hard for an actor to get a good-sized laugh by hopping up a flight of stairs, two at a time, with his pants around his ankles?

No. It is not hard. It is difficult to get a good good-sized laugh, if you perceive the distinction. A good good-sized one may happen if, for example, the performer executes the bit faster than you’d expect, as if the upward-bound two-step were the most natural thing in the world. Done just so, it’s Samuel Beckett’s notion of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” made literal--cheap comic poetry in motion.

Ron Campbell does it just so. As Frederick Fellows, the nosebleed-prone actor stuck in a low-rent stage comedy titled “Nothing On,” the actor brings a lovely comic cluelessness to an otherwise fair staging of “Noises Off,” now at International City Theatre in Long Beach.

With this production, ICT settles into its permanent home, the Center Theater of the Long Beach Performing Arts Center. The largeish auditorium has been downsized, successfully, into a modified proscenium house. The size and scale feel right.

If “Noises Off” itself feels slightly off, it nonetheless improves upon the previous farce offered by ICT, “Lend Me a Tenor.” Campbell swipes this one out from under his cohort’s noses, but graciously so. The performer, whose demeanor here could be described as “floppy,” doesn’t unduly call attention to his cleverness, his artfully artless way of keeping a bottle of booze hidden from a hard-drinking colleague, or--perhaps most mysteriously--his way of making an ascot look particularly fatuous.

In Act 1, it’s midnight and we’re in the middle of a panicky final rehearsal for “Nothing On.” We see the action from the audience’s point of view. Act 2, we’re backstage a month into the production’s tour of the English provinces. The formerly amiable actors have given in to petty jealousy and sabotage. Act 3, six weeks later, we see “Nothing On” once again from the audience’s point of view, with everything in shambles.

Michael Frayn’s 1982 comedy represents its own genre of meta-farce. It simultaneously exploits and skewers the garters-’n’-boxers school of comedy, whose most successful graduates include Ray Cooney of “Run for Your Wife” and “Wife Begins at Forty” fame. It’s extraordinarily clever. Frayn’s play is also infernally difficult, a three-act Rube Goldberg device, dazzling but hardly foolproof.

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ICT artistic director Shashin Desai’s staging gets the basics down, while falling prey here and there to a ham-handedness more appropriate to “Nothing On” than to “Noises Off.” The bits have been worked out well enough. But Act 2 in particular--Frayn’s most challenging, since it leaps into a realm wherein frazzled actors try to brain each other with axes backstage during a performance--comes across as effortful rather than effortless.

Jodi Carlisle’s dogged Dotty Otley (the actress playing the stock Cockney maid) and Matt Walker’s nimble Gary Lejeune (love that character name) fare most effectively here. No one’s bad. Campbell alone lends an inspired touch, two steps at a time when called for.

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* “Noises Off,” International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, Center Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 5. $25-$35. (562) 436-4610. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Frank Ashmore: Lloyd Dallas

William Caisley: Selsdon Mowbray/Burglar

Ron Campbell: Frederick Fellows/Phillip

Jodi Carlisle: Dotty Otley/Mrs. Clackett

Gail Godown: Belinda Blair/Flavia

Sarah Patrick: Poppy Norton-Taylor/Assistant Stage Manager

Jordan Savage: Brooke Ashton/Vicki

Matt Walker: Gary Lejeune/Roger

Brian Weber: Tim Allgood/Stage Manager

Written by Michael Frayn. Directed by Shashin Desai. Set by Bradley Kaye. Costumes by Sherry Linnell. Lighting by Liz Stillwell. Sound by Paul Fabre. Stage manager Michael Alan Ankney.