Meera Syal 'doesn't have to do any research' for Lyric Hammersmith's Noises Off revival

Noises Off: The classic farce will be returning to Lyric Hammersmith

Meera Syal said she did not have to “do any research” for her latest stage role – playing a fading actress in a revival of the classic comedy Noises Off.

The star is leading the cast in a new production bringing Michael Frayn’s play back to the Lyric Hammersmith almost 40 years after it premiered at the west London venue.

Syal said the show, about a group of actors performing a low-rent farce, was “fall on the floor funny” and showed the “emotional investment and commitment” performers give on stage.

The new production is set during the 1980s just as traditional farce was falling out of favour with the rise of alternative comedy.

She said: “That is why I think it is a love letter to the theatre, you can really see the messy lives and the emotional upheaval that they go through and yet they have to put the mask on to go on stage.

“That is where the comedy comes from, it is the dissonance between the hell that is going on in their personal lives and their public face.

“On the upside I don’t have to do any research, it is totally in your DNA all of that schizophrenia all actors have. Your public and your private faces are always being slipped on and off at a moment’s notice and particularly in this day and age when you walk out the house and everybody has got a mobile phone and if you’re incredibly well known that must be very difficult.

“You have to wear the public face a lot more than you did in those days I guess.”

The play, which has been performed regularly since it was first produced at the Lyric in 1982, has previously enjoyed runs in the West End and on Broadway and was filmed in 1992 with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve among the cast.

Frayn said: “It’s a great personal pleasure for me, of course, to see my play come home, after all its travels around the world in the last forty years, to the theatre where it took its first hopeful but still uncertain steps.”

Noises Off will run from June 17 to July 27.

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