Noises off in rehearsal at the Bruce Mason Centre

GREG DIXON watches a rehearsal of Noises Off, a farce about a farce.

A moment of disorientation. I am seated alone in a near-empty theatre, watching the first act of a play being rehearsed.

"Stop," bellows someone. I'm pretty sure this is in the script.

"Stop," bellows someone else minutes later. I'm pretty sure that one's not.

It quickly dawns. There are two directors - one real, one imagined - for this single company of players and they are rehearsing an act of a play in which actors are rehearsing an act of a play. Neither is quite fluent just yet, which is leading to my confusion.

"How about the words, love? Am I getting some of them right?" asks actor Ilona Rodgers. This turns out to be in the script.

"Some of them have a familiar ring," says actor Peter Elliott, who is playing a director.

"Only it's a fruit machine in there ... I open my mouth, and I never know if it's going to come out three oranges or two lemons and a banana," continues Rodgers, whose actor Dotty Otley is having difficulty playing housekeeper Mrs Clackett.

For the outsider, the overall effect of all this is rather farcical. Which funnily enough is the desired effect.

Rodgers, Elliot and co are rehearsing Michael Frayn's Noises Off, a farce about a group of actors putting on the farce Nothing On. One has been hailed as one of the funniest plays ever written, won an Olivier Award for best comedy in 1983 and has recently been successfully rewritten and revived in London's West End; the other has not. I'm sure you can guess which.

Noises Off is a three-act play about the process of theatre itself, says the real director of this Auckland Theatre Company production, Elric Hooper. "It's about the absurd lengths we go to in order to create an illusion of reality."

The action opens at the Grand Theatre, Weston-super-Mare, where a company of has-beens is braving a last-minute rehearsal of Nothing On. Dotty, an ex-soap star, has put up the money to tour it through the provinces.

You know the sort of thing, of course - full of double entendre and unbelievable coincidences. We used to get them quite frequently in New Zealand.

"The last one we had was Don't Dress for Dinner, where English television stars came out here and did godawful things and the mums and dads paid huge prices to see them," says Hooper, the engaging former artistic director of the Court Theatre in Christchurch.

But when Noises Off meets Nothing On, the result is rather more post-modern than old-fashioned.

"It's almost a critique of the farce because Frayn puts another layer on to it. We see the private lives of the actors, and in act two, for which the play is rightly famous, the set turns around and we see, after a month, how the actors have fallen apart and how their private lives are interfering with the performance. Except that they are professional enough to be able to commit mayhem offstage but get on to the stage to do their work."

The show must go on and all that. Certainly every actor can tell a story of when the serious job of acting has unexpectedly become something else altogether.

Rodgers remembers when she and Ian Mune were on stage performing the serious and worthy Chekhov play Three Sisters at the Mercury Theatre when suddenly there was a pregnant pause where another actor should have been.

"What had happened down in the Green Room was that they had all been talking and waiting for Lee Grant to go on. And she'd forgotten, so four people were late. Ian walked over to me on stage and said, 'They haven't come out,' so we had this ad-lib conversation. Then suddenly there was this sound of running feet and they all came on.

"Every time I do Noises Off I think, I've been in this hell."

A hell which is apparently very, very funny. Daily Telegraph critic Charles Spencer describes it as "a dramatic machine for making you laugh" and found, during the National Theatre's acclaimed revival of the play in 2000, he did laugh so much it hurt.

But farce is also difficult to play. Hooper says it demands "surgical acting, precision acting" and there are not many New Zealand actors with skills equal to it.

Rodgers believes that if the audience for one moment sniffs that the actors are being funny, it will feel cheated. The macabre things that happen on stage must be completely believable to the characters they happen to or it just won't work.

"When we first started doing this, we all used to laugh," Rodgers says. "And as we're flogging on, because Elric is such a taskmaster, it's becoming deeply, deeply serious. I think that's the secret: with it not being funny for us, the laughs will come as an enormous surprise."

And come they most certainly will. If comedy ain't pretty, farce is downright ugly.

"There is a very important thing about farce," says Hooper, "at the core of it is cruelty. The French are unashamed by that. They'll actually advertise a play [as a piece of cruelty]. But English people don't think that's really very nice.

"But laughter at other people's misfortunes is the obverse side of catharsis. You watch tragedy, which is the sister of farce, so someone else suffers on your behalf.

"In farce you see people going through absolute horrors but you're safe. You're allowed to laugh and you're allowed to enjoy cruelty."

Too right, it's in the script.

* Noises off, Bruce Mason Centre, from Thursday to June 8.