A very British omnishambles: how The Play That Goes Wrong conquered the world | Theatre

A bunch of twerps are floundering in the spotlight, striving to bluff their way through disaster. The vibe is not quite keep calm and carry on, more like carry on regardless. It could be a scene from any number of recent British political calamities. But this is the premise of the deliriously funny The Play That Goes Wrong, about a hapless am-dram troupe staging a whodunnit.

Despite having its premiere in a tiny room above a London pub, there is nothing amateurish about the Olivier award-winning comedy – one of the longest-running shows currently in the West End. It spawned a franchise of “Goes Wrong” farces on stage, as well as a dazzlingly inventive TV series, and catapulted the creators, Mischief Theatre, to international glory. The play is on in Krakow, Kladno and Kyiv and has been performed in many other European cities and on Broadway. Next year it tours Australia and New Zealand.

You may wonder what sort of message this pratfall-packed export is sending about Britain, so often a laughing stock on the international stage. The play was first performed at the Old Red Lion in London at the end of 2012, just as “omnishambles” was named word of the year. Are the chaotic failures of its fictional Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society a theatrical equivalent to Boris Johnson dangling on a zipwire during the Olympics, hoist by his own petard? Much like the New Yorker magazine channelled Monty Python with its “silly walk off a cliff” cover about the 2016 EU referendum.

A Spanish version, La Función Que Sale Mal, has been a hit in Madrid for six years. When I arrive at the city’s Amaya theatre, it is striking how closely the set resembles that at London’s Duchess theatre, where the play recently toasted its 10th birthday. On the left of the stage is a portrait of a king charles spaniel and the malfunctioning mantelpiece of Haversham Manor, where the mystery takes place. On the right is a precarious platform that will provide a cliffhanging set piece of physical comedy. The curtain goes up in a couple of hours so I have time to perch on the set’s chaise longue to chat with actor Adrià Olay and resident director Víctor Conde.

Olay plays Chris, the budding impresario and overweening yet underwhelming director of The Murder at Haversham Manor, who also has the plum role of an inspector. “Audiences enjoy watching someone in power encounter problems,” he says. “Maybe there’s an element of thinking, ‘I could do a better job than that. Why is that guy in charge?’” Audiences delight in how the stage manager takes over. “They think, ‘That’s one of us,’” adds Olay.

In Spain, the play has become a phenomenon, says Conde. He likens it to The Lion King – “a title that will survive”. It brings a particular schadenfreude for theatre industry folk. “I have friends – actors and directors – who have seen it several times,” Conde says. “Everything that you’re afraid of happening on stage happens here.”

But the play has also entered the political lexicon as a shorthand for crises in the ruling class. “It was in the news as a headline,” explains Conde, referring to when the Spanish PM, Pedro Sánchez, considered resigning amid corruption allegations against his wife, Begoña Gómez. A piece in El Español depicted Sánchez and Gómez as characters in the comedy, wearing its signature costumes and sharing the chaise longue: him in smoking jacket and her in red evening dress.

In the UK, too, the play’s gaffes and collective dysfunction have chimed with our own news headlines. Take Theresa May’s 2017 party conference speech when she lost her voice and the letters began to drop off her backdrop’s slogan, like the collapsing title on the play’s poster. It was likened to “the speech that goes wrong” in the press, and the ways in which the amateur actors tie themselves in knots evokes other mishaps from the “Brexit means Brexit” years. The actors are sometimes shown to have no understanding of their lines and are just parroting what they’ve been told to. Getting the job done, making it to the final curtain, is the best they can hope for. But some are blithely confident about fooling the public. “Of course they didn’t notice – I improvised!” bellows one.

“We’ve arrived in a time and place in politics that we never expected we could be in,” says Conde, who adds that if he had seen some of today’s news back in the 1980s he would have assumed it was a comedy. If audiences laugh at the chaos of The Play That Goes Wrong, he says, it is partly because its depiction of dysfunctional leadership is so familiar.

For Marcos Cámara, the play’s Spanish producer, this comedy is a universal story “about how you overcome adversity”. Spain has shown a huge appetite for Agatha Christie thrillers and other murder mysteries, but he says that when he first put it on: “Everybody thought we were crazy! It was something super British – they thought people wouldn’t understand it.” Successful Spanish productions tend to use one or two big name actors, he adds, but The Play That Goes Wrong proves “you don’t need a star. You need a very good play and the correct marketing. Everybody understands what to expect from the title.”

Another significant factor in its success is that the whole family can come, says Cámara. Conde agrees: “Grandparents come with the children. I’ve seen families take up 10 seats.” He draws a comparison to Michael Crawford’s style of humour (“The voice and the poses, all very subtle”) as well as Peter Shaffer’s farce Black Comedy (“That kind of elegance, but at the same time so ridiculous”). The choreography of the slapstick sequences takes up a lot of rehearsal time. When the play celebrated 10 years at the Duchess, one of Mischief’s actor-writers, Jonathan Sayer, gave a speech with some eyebrow-raising statistics, including that “106 actors have been struck by objects 125,000 times”. That takes a lot of practice. “If the actors don’t end up exhausted, something’s gone wrong,” says Conde.

The physicality of the comedy is key to the play’s global appeal, says Jessica Hall, Mischief’s licensing manager. She joined the team in 2018 when interest from international producers was taking off. The company has grown with “unbelievable speed”, and The Play That Goes Wrong has been put on in more than 50 countries. Many are “replica” productions using familiar costumes and props, as in Madrid. Replicating musical productions is common but for plays it is quite unusual, says Hall. Normally a script would be licensed and a new company “would get on and do their own thing”. But Mischief’s specific stage design “is integral to how the play works”, so international theatres that opt for a replica version are given a “show bible” with set specifications and other details to ensure the precision-engineered comedy comes off.

Unlike some musical replicas, Hall adds, “we don’t require the producers to engage the original creative team” – which can be a costly and time-consuming process. “We want Mischief to be accessible. We provide as much support as we can remotely, and if they want to engage one of our original team, they can – but they don’t have to.” This approach means smaller theatres can afford to replicate a hit West End production.

The play’s Madrid home has around 750 seats (London’s Duchess has two-thirds that number). Dailes theatre in Riga, Latvia, where it has run for three years, has an even larger audience. Its stage, too, is considerably vaster, but due to the dimensions of a replica production, some of it goes unused. In Riga, the comedy is in repertory along with Peter Pan Goes Wrong, and some of the acting ensemble alternate their humorous roles with parts in straight plays such as Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. Dailes’s artistic director, Viesturs Kairišs, has programmed many British dramas at the theatre. Latvians love our country house mysteries, he says, so a parody of a whodunnit is particularly appealing.

He likens the original script by Sayer, Henry Lewis and Henry Shields (who all met at Lamda) to a piece of perfect machinery. Observing from backstage during a performance, “you can see that mechanism and how the whole show functions. It’s like a Swiss watch.” The show is performed with English surtitles and its Latvian title could be roughly translated as “the play that goes into the butter”. A theatre company from Ukraine were brought to Latvia to learn the play and put on a free performance there for an audience of Ukrainians in exile; the company, Left Bank, now stage it in Kyiv.

Kairišs says that British humour is seen as the gold standard in Europe, a view shared by the team in Madrid. The French version of the play, named Les Faux British, won a prestigious Molière award for best comedy and the state broadcaster France Télévisions called it “hilarious British humour” with a “very Monty Python tone”. Cámara, whose company has also staged Matilda and Billy Elliot in Spain, lauds the groundbreaking theatre he has seen on visits to England, citing Rebecca Frecknall’s Cabaret and Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard. For him, the joke in The Play That Goes Wrong isn’t about any particularly British ineptitude. “For us, you’re super serious people with a very high standard of theatre. That’s what makes it so funny.”