THEATRE REVIEW

JUNE 2026 | Volume 264

 

Since its British premiere in 2014, The Play That Goes Wrong has become a worldwide phenomenon, playing in more than thirty countries and, I’m sure, hilarious in them all. Presenting an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, the well-meaning amateurs of a provincial English drama society manage to bungle every conceivable element of play production. The result, in the right hands, is a slapstick metatheatrical masterpiece.

You do have to be a slapstick fan to appreciate the comic chaos because the plot, such as it is, ultimately gets buried in the action and laughter. And the play-within-the-play’s characters are barely even caricatures. Our focus is on the Cornley Drama Society’s cast and crew as they try, and fail, to navigate the increasingly deteriorating circumstances on stage. It’s like watching people trying to put on a play during an earthquake.

Josh Epstein’s Arts Club production gets nearly everything right. I laughed until it hurt.

We’re in a provincial drawing room on the eve of an engagement party for Charles (Ben Elliott) and Florence (Genevieve Fleming) when Charles turns up mysteriously dead. His best friend Thomas (Andrew McNee), Florence’s brother Cecil (Zander Eke), and Perkins the butler (Scott Bellis) will all be primary suspects as will Florence herself when Inspector Carter (PraneetAkilla) arrives to investigate.

So much goes wrong from the pre-show to the curtain call that there’s barely time to breathe between laughs. Entrances and exits are botched or made at the wrong times. Props are misplaced and fall off the walls. The inept actors have to mime or improvise and their choices are almost always comically bizarre. The backstage crew shows up in the most inappropriate places.

Some of the best comic moments are highly physical: Charles’fish-like attempt to surreptitiously exit the stage even though he’s dead; a swordfight, mostly sans swords, between Cecil and Thomas; Florence’s being unseemly dragged offstage through a window after she is accidentally knocked unconscious. Fleming’s body takes the brunt of the play’s physical abuse. I heard a couple of post-show comments about how black and blue she must be. The guys perform some pretty spectacular acrobatics, too, taking pratfalls and hanging off the collapsing second-floor office balcony.

After the actress playing Florence is knocked out, stage manager Annie (Kelli Ogmundson) takes her place onstage, script in hand, and manages to perform the character even more badly until the original Florence (i.e., Fleming) comes back onstage in her underwear. From that point, basically the last quarter of the play, the two women fight to be the one to play Florence, a fight that becomes increasingly physical and funny but upstages the last ten minutes or so of The Play That Goes Wrong.Director Epstein needs to focus that final segment better.

Bellis and McNee, two of the very best comedians in the city, give their characters lots of comic texture. Bellis puts some delicious twists into the butler’s slo-mo comic confusion. Eke, a new face to me, is very funny in his character’s narcissistic need to get the audience’s approval. Ogmundson, who was brilliant this spring in the solo drama Harm, shows a lovely knack for comedy in Annie, and her fight with Fleming’s Florence is, literally, a knockout (credit fight director Mike Kovac—and Fleming’s ability to take punishment). Akilla does excellent work driving the action as the Inspector, doubling as the play-within-the-play’s goofy director, and taking some acrobatic falls himself.

Perhaps the real hero of this piece is set designer Ryan Cormack whose staid drawing room performs its own astonishing contortions. The set’s careful design and mechanics, along with Epstein’s care and the bravery of the actors, insures that no one gets hurt—although it sure looks as if they could.

 

 

 

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