Behind the Scenes with Mischief Theatre
It's a well-known saying that humour doesn't translate - while West End musicals can be rolled out internationally, ready to wow audiences with flashy visuals and ear-worm tunes, comedies tend to stay on home turf. So the ability of Mischief Theatre to find international success deserves a closer look. The young company has launched an incredible three West End hit comedies in as many years: first The Play That Goes Wrong, then Peter Pan Goes Wrong, now The Comedy About A Bank Robbery. And they've taken their productions to some of the world's major cities. According to Henry Lewis, one of the company's three writers, the secret is: "the humour is universal – in that people everywhere make mistakes." For Mischief Theatre's first two shows, they styled themselves as The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, a chaotic am-dram troupe whose lack of talent never got in the way of their wildly ambitious schemes. The Play That Goes Wrong is a deliberately disastrous staging of a 1920s murder-mystery play, full of catastrophic technical errors. A corpse can't quite stay dead. A stage manager gets trapped halfway through a window. The set walls tumble down, and the audience collapse laughing along with them. Lewis describes it as "very English in its style. That traditionally British sense of being polite and not saying when things are wrong, that's core to its humour." He reels off a list of his influences, like a Who's Who of classic British comedy: Charlie Chaplin, Fawlty Towers... "there's a great tradition, and you see less of that type of comedy these days." He has a point. Writers are losing interest in the stock-in-trade of comedy greats: slapstick, farce, misunderstandings, wordplay and gross silliness. A new generation of comedies have a kind of psychological bleakness to them, exposing innermost feelings – like the unsparing monologues of Peep Show, for example, where shame drives Jeremy to barbecue and eat a family pet. "We're a bit more traditional compared to, say, The Office," says Lewis. "There's nothing in our work, on the whole, that's got that kind of darkness. It's that farcical, joyous energy we like." And that joyous energy has proved infectious. Lewis lists the names of world cities that are now hosting Mischief Theatre shows: "Budapest, Bulgaria, Athens, Tokyo, Israel..." Paris has been a particular success, perhaps unsurprisingly given France's centuries-old tradition of gloriously silly farces. A French adaptation of The Play That Goes Wrong even won a Molière Award – a prestigious theatrical accolade named after France's beloved 17th century comic playwright. Revealingly, this version is about "a group of Anglophiles who are obsessed with English culture" -- an approach which amplifies the nostalgic ideas that are already in the play's DNA. Whereas their two previous shows used a meta-theatrical structure, Mischief Theatre's latest offering The Comedy About A Bank Robbery is, on the face of it, a more traditional kind of comedy. It's played, says Lewis, "with a fourth wall, and things don't go wrong – on purpose anyway." But the company has taken an ambitious leap. The bank robbery of the title is played out in an awe-inspiringly elaborate style, taking inspiration from high-stakes stunt master Buster Keaton. "[The show] has quite a lot of new, complicated technical elements to it," explains Lewis. "There's a big sequence where we flip the perspective, some circusy stuff, some stunts at height. We have to be careful!" Artifice, danger and very careful planning go into creating the impression of out-of-control mayhem in Mischief Theatre's shows. Dominic Cavendish selected the company's first show as one of the worst of 2014 in The Telegraph, believing that it was a well-intentioned play that genuinely had gone wrong. But Lewis is confident that the team have won round the critics – as a wave of rave reviews attest: "At the beginning people might have thought we were just incompetent, but not now. It's really important to be quite precise, so people know the real actors are in control." Given their growing success here and round the globe, it's even more apparent that Mischief Theatre know exactly what they're doing.