Loving the laughter in Frayn farce 3

10:26am Thursday 2nd October 2008

NICK UTECHIN talks to the former Dr Who Colin Baker about his starring role in Noises Off at the Oxford Playhouse this week

Plays and actors often come with health warnings. There’s ‘The Scottish Play’; Kenneth Branagh in his twenties was dubbed the ‘best’ everything; Hamlet is always described as the most difficult play — and lead role in the Shakespearian canon.

So it is with Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, described in The New York Times when the play opened on Broadway in 1982 after its initial London run as "the funniest comedy ever written". That is a lot to live up to for anyone putting the play on now, and this week, Oxford audiences are seeing how a company headed by Colin Baker and Maggie Steed fare with it at the Playhouse.

Noises Off is the ultimate play within a play within — er — another play. A low-rent theatrical touring company mounts a traditional British farce called Nothing On and brings it to dress-rehearsal stage. What follows is comedic chaos as actors perform, exit and come backstage, where an entirely different drama/farce is played out.

Colin Baker (yes, Dr Who from 1983-6, and the dastardly Paul Merroney in The Brothers a decade earlier) was analytical: "This play is more than broad farce — it’s in a separate league. Frayn avoided making the play too 'in' and therefore inaccessible to the audience. He took the British farce and twisted it through another dimension by introducing the backstage story in a way that increases the humour. Then add the Act II reversal of the set so the deteriorating relationships on the cast are set against the on-stage play, and the end result is the funniest play I have seen in a theatre."

Baker saw the original production and welcomes his role as Selsdon Mowbray. "He’s an elderly character actor (so it is a character part for me in all senses of the word) who’s hard of hearing and even harder to find when he should be on stage. He’s also alleged to have a drink problem, so when both he and a bottle of whisky bought by the director for the pretty young actress go missing simultaneously, then drastic measures are called for."

Baker, who lives near Henley, has spent most of his time on stage rather than on TV during the past two decades — "I’d love to get back working in front of the cameras for a while, but as my agent points out to me, I’m never available because theatre jobs have long contracts and TV not these days." And he wants the long contracts — given that he still has three children of pre-university age.

His name, though, was made for television audiences in the early 1970s as ‘the most hated man in Britain’, Merroney in The Brothers.

"It was an interesting character to play,’ Baker told me, "because he wasn’t a villain in the real sense of the word (like JR Ewing, for example) but simply a businessman for whom the success of the company meant more than anything else, including personal relationships. He was a complex character, and very enjoyable to play."

I then asked him three questions about Dr Who, slightly worried about my own predictability. What did he try to invest in that iconic part (he was the sixth, taking over from Peter Davison)? "Three years of my life. I tried to add a love of the English language and the arrogance that characterised Merroney but tempered with an overriding sense of right and justice. The fact I was offered the part meant that the producers had faith in me; that’s very empowering.

"The foolhardiness of youth, perhaps?"

He lasted 35 episodes only. What happened? "Long story, but essentially Michael Grade came to the BBC, hated the programme, cancelled it, brought it back and then demanded a new Doctor. End of story, really."

And so the inevitable: after all these years, does he get bored by people asking him about Dr Who? Baker was gratifyingly less brusque this time. "Never! How could I get bored with being reminded that I once did something in my life that other people responded to so warmly and with such affection? I get very bored with actors who affect a lofty disdain for the very things that make them interesting to the public. Go for a life where you have to put widgets in boxes every day, then."

There is another side to Colin Baker’s professional life of which I was entirely unaware until two weeks ago: he co-writes children’s musicals. Having got to know George Hastings, a composer and musician based in County Durham, when in pantomime in the 1980s, they have collaborated so far on seven plays — from versions of Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty to more solid fare as The Bolden Factor, a history of that colliery town.

Baker is clearly steeped in all the performing arts; if he is primarily known for two iconic TV roles from a fair few years ago, so what? You can be sure that it’s a rather more formidable thespian background than Selsdon Mowbray brings to Noises Off.

Noises Off is at the Oxford Playhouse until tomorrow (box office tel 01865 305305). The play is at Milton Keynes Theatre from November 10-15 (0870 060 6652).

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