I was in London yesterday for a morning show at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, and on a bit of a whim my wife and I decided to grab tickets for The Play That Goes Wrong later that evening. I first saw it when it opened years ago, so I was curious to see how it had aged. Here’s my review.
When I first saw The Play That Goes Wrong, it felt like a small miracle of comic engineering.
Back then, it was sharp. Observed. Precise. The joke was never just that things fell over. The joke was that a troupe of deeply committed, slightly deluded amateur actors were desperately trying to hold their production together as the world collapsed around them. That tension between catastrophe and commitment was everything. The comedy came from sincerity.
It had pathos. You almost rooted for them. Beneath the collapsing mantelshelves and misfiring props was something recognisable: people trying their absolute best, clinging to dignity while chaos mounted. The timing was immaculate. The physical comedy was earned. It felt crafted, not cranked out.
Seeing it again years later, something has shifted.
What was once a tightly observed parody now plays like broad pantomime. Subtlety has been flattened into noise. Instead of watching actors fighting to maintain the illusion of a play, we’re watching performers signalling that something silly is about to happen. The central conceit, that these characters believe in their production with total seriousness, seems to have evaporated. Without that conviction, the whole structure wobbles.
Farce only works when it’s played straight. Once it tips into self-awareness and exaggeration for its own sake, the rhythm dies. The gags become predictable. The chaos feels manufactured rather than inevitable. And when timing slips, physical comedy stops being balletic and starts feeling clumsy.
Most disappointing of all is the sense that it’s now being run as a dependable machine. The edges have been sanded off. The danger is gone. What was once thrillingly precise now feels churned out, like the scaffolding remains but the craft has drained away.
It is such a shame. The original production proved how intelligent slapstick can be. It showed that silliness and sincerity can coexist, and that the biggest laughs often come from watching people try desperately not to fail.
Now it feels wrung out. Repeated beats. One-note chaos where there used to be craft.
We left at the interval. Not in outrage. Not in protest. Just in quiet disappointment. After an hour it felt clear that what had once been tightly tuned had become blunt and noisy.
The real irony is hard to miss. A play about things going wrong only works when everything underneath is meticulously right. The first time I saw it, that precision was invisible and brilliant. Now the machinery shows, and without the care that once powered it, the whole thing simply collapses.
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