Erin Harrington reviews The Play That Goes Wrong, by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, directed by Anna Marshall, at the James Hay Theatre, Tuesday 6 May 2025.
The multi-award-winning disaster comedy The Play That Goes Wrong has entertained literally millions of people since its London debut in 2014. This Australasian production is directed beautifully by Anna Marshall, who also worked on the West End production. It has been tweaked a little for local audiences, and still honours the original’s self-referential love letter to slapstick, stage trickery, and the theatre, darling.
After a series of low budget, low resource and low quality productions, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society is presenting a lavish production of The Murder at Haversham Manor, a 1920s murder mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie. The lord of the manor is dead, and the inspector has been called. Suicide, or murder? Everyone’s a suspect: the fiancée, the brother, the school chum, the butler. There’s poison, missing money, a secret ledger, and a series of betrayals. But even before the show starts there’s chaos. Crew race around the audience looking for a lost dog and try to fix bits that keep falling off the set. This establishes the production’s creative approach to knockabout physical humour, and sets in motion an increasingly absurd set of on- and offstage calamities.
The whodunnit play itself, a great pastiche of the genre, is mess from the beginning. Doors don’t open and things fall off the walls. Actors drop lines, fumble with props, and injure one another. The crew mess up their cues or find themselves marooned, and visible, on stage. Over the production’s 2+ hour run these failures cascade, like an incredible Rube Goldberg machine of errors, as the show must go on no matter how disastrous things are. It would be rude to spoil the show’s many surprises, running gags, and extraordinary diversions; suffice to say its enormous fun. It’s also impeccably designed, from the lavish living room and the colourful, sometimes over-the-top costuming, to the ridiculous set dressing and well-appointed props.
The production makes great use of the James Hay Theatre’s layout, especially in the way it involves the audience. There is impressive character, physical and vocal work from the ensemble – so many plummy, tortured vowels! So many power poses! There’s also a lot of precise and challenging behind the scenes work at play to keep things running, so it was great to see the real-life backstage performers join the actors at final bows.
A key element of the show’s pleasure is seeing the Drama Society’s actors and technicians struggle with the play, and each other, as things get increasingly fraught. There are some extremely satisfying character moments, in particular way the self-involved director Chris (Jonathan Martin), who also stars as Inspector Carter, interacts with the audience with a simmering combination of largesse and hostility.
This is a technically demanding production, at every level, requiring impeccable timing and tight choreography. I do find that the shape of some of the players’ character arcs could be made a little clearer, especially as the play gets increasingly out of hand and some of the performers’ ambitions and conflicts threaten to derail everything. Some dialogue – perhaps unamplified? – also gets lost in moments of noise or chaos, but that doesn’t deter the audience. I haven’t been in a room that’s laughed so hard, and so often, and that is so fully engaged with the action for a very long time. Anyone who has ever dabbled in amateur dramatics will find a lot to love, and to groan at. It’s an extremely entertaining and satisfying production, and highly recommended for all ages – a play that does just about everything right.
The Play That Goes Wrong plays in Christchurch until 11 May 2025, then continues its tour through New Zealand and Australia. Information is here.
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