The Terrible False Deception (A Four Act Play in 40 Minutes or 43 With Laughs!)

Way out in Morningside is a little gem of this year’s Fringe. Tom Stoppard and Tim Crouch collide in four farces for the price of one. Rafe Macpherson’s comedy, a European debut despite being written back in 1988, consists of four 10-minute scenes which have identical set, costumes, movement and blocking. But the script changes each time. 

An actor comes on stage, describing everything she’s doing, adjusting a picture frame, picking up a letter. Others join her, also performing their inner monologues like they’re lines. They’re dressed in ridiculously over-the-top period costumes on an over-the-top period set—all brocade curtains and gilt furniture. 

For 10 minutes they play out a scene, stuck in their own heads, complaining to the audience about how the director is rubbish, about how they think they’re all above this play, how they all hate each other. Blackout. 

Then it happens all over again: exactly the same movements, entrances, exits, gestures—the first actor adjusts the picture frame and picks up the letter–except it’s a different script. Now they’re performing a piss take of Chekhovian drama, spouting deliberately silly lines in silly accents like, “How quickly these flower petals will fade”, with names like Katia Katarinovna. But now we know what they’re thinking as they perform, and it’s hilarious. 

Two more scenes follow, each peeling back a layer of theatricality and fondly mocking some other aspect of theatre. The cast does really well to act so badly and this farce, four ways, is a sharply observed piece of meta-theatrical silliness.