In 'The Play That Goes Wrong' Director Sean Turn Finds The Funny In Failing

Most theatre directors drill their actors so that they don't make mistakes, but in the aptly named The Play That Goes Wrong, British director Sean Turner has spent weeks with his cast rehearsing mishaps into the show. This slapstick-driven farce is a play within a play about the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society's disastrous staging of 1920s thriller The Murder At Haversham Manor. Premiered at the Old Red Lion Theatre in 2012 before transferring the following year to the West End, it earned a slew of rave reviews during its debut season as well as picking up a coveted Olivier Award for Best New Comedy to boot. Now it's about to kick off an Australian tour in Melbourne, before heading on to Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth.

Ironically, it takes a lot of skill to pull off being this bad, Turner says. "It really isn't easy being terrible. You need really talented actors who are very confident and comfortable in themselves," he explains. "Preparing this show always starts with the basics of clowning. In fact, we spend most of the first week of rehearsals not really looking at the script at all but getting the cast to grips with being clowns. The great thing about that is that the show is never the same twice, even though the dialogue and action stay the same. It's a new show every time because the actors bring new things to the clowning every night"

"To be honest, you get to week four of rehearsals and most of us have forgotten that it's funny."

This play of engineered snafus is carefully constructed for maximum chaos, but the precision timing of these epic fails throws up a second irony: things have to go right in order for them to go wrong. "The actors need to be incredibly intelligent, and good at improvisation at times if they have to solve things that go awry," Turner notes. "We also do a lot of intense physical preparation, working on core strength to make sure that the cast is in peak physical condition. Some of the more complex scenes towards the end of the play, which are very long and demanding physical sequences, we run every single day to make sure they are point perfect. Again, it's relying on having actors that are willing to go to those places and are willing to get bruises and bangs along the way."

The kinds of bumbling fluffs that the cast of The Play That Goes Wrong has worked so hard to perfect are the stuff of nightmares for most stage performers. Interestingly, working on this production has been something of a cathartic experience for Turner and his troupe. "Everyone in the show has been in a scene at some point in their career where the prop they needed wasn't there or somebody was late for a cue. There was a time I played Romeo when I was about eighteen, and in the scene where Romeo is banished to Mantua and Balthazar is supposed to come and give him the news that Juliet is dead, the chap playing Balthazar was off somewhere else, watching telly or something, and just didn't show up. So I was left on stage for what felt like hours improvising. It's every actor's worst nightmare and it does happen more often than you'd think, but you'd have to be made of stone not to find it funny. As a director, it's a bit different because when you're sat in the auditorium watching things unfold, there's not much you can do if the show starts to come off the rails. But that's the thrill of live performance — anything can happen."

While much of the comedy is propelled by a runaway series of slip-ups (both metaphorical and literal), the humour is amplified by the deadpan incredulity of the performers as they struggle to maintain their show-must-go-on spirit. Desensitising the cast to the guffaw-inducing shenanigans so they can keep a straight face in front of a hysterical audience has been an important part of the rehearsal process, Turner shares. “To be honest, you get to week four of rehearsals and most of us have forgotten that it's funny in any way, shape or form. It’s like ‘Is this funny? Is this ever going to work?’ But the key thing is that the actors play the absolute truth, and the truth is that these characters want it to go right. Every single thing that goes wrong is painful for them. If it's ever just played for laughs, that’s when the show dies, that’s when the comedy doesn't work.”

The Australian tour of The Play That Goes Wrong opens 22 Feb, at Melbourne's Comedy Theatre