Alix and Roy - rehearsals photo
The acclaimed comedy Noises Off by Michael Frayn is coming to Scotland Island, with performances at the Community Hall on 19, 20, 26 and 27 June 2026.
Widely regarded as one of the funniest farces ever written, Noises Off follows a theatre company as their production descends into chaos – on stage and behind the scenes. What begins as a shaky dress rehearsal spirals into a spectacularly disastrous final performance.
The play is famous for its large-scale staging, traditionally requiring a two-storey revolving set. Bringing it to a small island venue has required ingenuity and adaptation.
‘“It’s usually performed on a massive two-storey set – something we could never squeeze into our community hall,” said co-producer Roy Baker.
“But with the author’s permission, we’ve created a scaled-down version that still captures all the pace and energy of the original.”
The production has been adapted for the Scotland Island stage by Roy Baker, who co-produces with Jess McGowan. It is directed by Paul Kininmonth. Cast and crew are drawn from the offshore Pittwater community.
Performances begin at 7 pm. A bar, operated by the Pittwater Offshore Men’s Shed, will be open before and after the show and during the interval (no BYO).
A special ferry service will run after both Friday performances, returning audience members to Church Point and the western foreshore. It will depart Tennis Court Wharf approximately 15 minutes after the performance.
Mainland guests are encouraged to catch the 6.15 pm ferry (Fridays) or 6.30 pm ferry (Saturdays) from Church Point. The journey to Tennis Court Wharf takes around 10 minutes, followed by a short walk to the hall. Water taxis are also available.
Tickets are on sale via Humanitix: events.humanitix.com/noises-off
Reuban and Sophie - rehearsals photo
Why I like the play, and why I think you will too
By Roy Baker
If any play can insist on being counted among the funniest and most successful of twentieth-century comedies, it’s Noises Off. Originally conceived by London playwright Michael Frayn in the 1970s, its appeal has proved enduring and universal, staged thousands of times in many languages worldwide.
This coming month the play reaches Scotland Island, performing in the Community Hall on 19, 20, 26 & 27 June, starting 7 pm. Tickets are on sale now, and there will be a bar, plus a late ferry after both Friday performances to return audience members to Church Point and the western foreshore.
How to sell it to you? Well, it’s funny. Undeniably funny. I fell in love with it straight away, seeing in it the frenetic energy of Fawlty Towers, surely the apotheosis of late twentieth-century British comedy. They date from the same era, and both are rooted in the well-tested tropes of English farce: escalating chaos and implausible misunderstandings. But, like John Cleese and Connie Booth, Frayn revivified and extended the genre.
Much of Fawlty Towers' success comes from the quality of writing; most of us can quote at least one line, even if it's only 'Don't mention the war'. Then there are the characterisations, such as the hapless waiter Manuel. Frayn's characters are equally enduring, and he serves up the same verbal dexterity, but this time it's sardines with plenty of sauce and a generous portion of word salad.
Noises Off consists of a play within a play. The inner play is a classic English farce called Nothing On. This is full of good old-fashioned pratfalls and enough trousers-round-ankles ribaldry to shock any English country vicar. That on its own would be fun. But where Noises Off really shines is in its outer or meta-play, which follows a group of hapless actors trying, but not quite succeeding, in performing Nothing On. That’s where the humour really lands.
Frayn’s central preoccupation is with the illusion of human control. As a species we’re a hubristic lot, not least theatre directors. Think you can corral a difficult cast into a comedy engineered for mechanical precision? Think again. Actors have frailties: Noises Off is a study in how they cope – and collapse – under stress. Live theatre always teeters on the brink of chaos. Isn’t that part of the appeal? We go along wondering whether something will go wrong. And on Scotland Island it usually does.
Noises Off does for live performance what bloopers and gag reels did for cinema: we all enjoy a bit of a disaster – preferably someone else’s. But Noises Off does a lot more than demonstrate the diablerie of props, sets, fellow actors and maddeningly complex scripts. As one critic puts it, Frayn, a man of both comic and philosophical genius, ‘disrupts the idea of a discoverable truth’. How so?
The ‘play within a play’ structure invites the audience to consider what’s real and what isn’t. Usually we think of what happens on stage as performance, and everything else as real. But, done well, the device leads to a mental jolt, a moment of disorientation, when we realise we are losing the distinction between performance and reality.
The reality of offshore life often strays into the unreal, even surreal. So what better than Noises Off on the Scotland Island stage? You might even start believing we're proper actors, rather than just pretending. A garbled line? It’s in the script. A mistimed entrance? No, that was deliberate. What better cloak for incompetence than performative intention? After all, isn’t that what most of us spend our lives doing?
Bibi and Jess - rehearsals photo
Sophie and Bruce - rehearsals photo