Peter Pan Goes Wrong: A comedy of errors

The creators of West End hit 'The Play That Goes Wrong' are busily working their magic on Peter Pan

Farce trio: Jonathan Sayer, Henry Shields and Henry Lewis (Simon Spicknell)

In a south London hangar, a West End show is in rehearsal. It is all going spectacularly wrong and exactly to plan. One actor has caught fire and two others are trapped inside a collapsing bunk bed. And this being Peter Pan – or a version of it – a third performer doesn't so much as fly through the window of the Darling family's nursery, as into it. It's alarmingly dangerous-looking stuff. And in rehearsals, at least, it seems entirely possible that Peter Pan Goes Wrong, as the show is called, will match the success of its sister show The Play That Goes Wrong, which was last year's surprise hit and is still going strong.

Then the bunk bed collapses a little further or earlier than one of the show's writer/performers Jonathan Sayer expects, hitting him on the head. Sayer swears loudly – not a line of dialogue from either the play or J M Barrie. But it's OK. He hasn't cried “cabbage!” the show's “safe word” reserved for when Peter Pan Goes Wrong really does go wrong. Though later “cabbage” is heard when Captain Hook's hook accidentally smacks an actor in the face and knocks him to the floor.

Sayer co-founded Mischief Theatre with fellow writer-performers Henry Lewis and Henry Shields while still at drama school, just to “keep ourselves busy”, as Shields puts it. They did improv mostly, performing in pubs, clubs and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Then, while the three were living together in a damp flat in Gunnersbury, west London, they began writing Murder Before Christmas, which became The Play That Goes Wrong and established the formula that involves a hapless troupe of am-dram players from The Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society soldiering on as their production and its set disintegrate around them.

It was first performed at London's Old Red Lion Pub theatre in 2013. Next autumn they take it to Broadway. So how many Goes Wrong plays can they produce?

“Three exist, although we only staged two of them,” says Shields. “The third is The Nativity Goes Wrong, which was performed in Reading but not by us. One day we might do that.”

Physically the three 27-year-olds couldn't be more different. Shields is tall and has the bearing and jawline of a military man (he comes from a line of pilots), Sayer is shorter and of wiry build, while Lewis is roughly the size and shape of a grizzly bear which allows for a series of gags about getting stuck in various parts of the set. But their comedy loves and influences are similar.

“I've always found massive visual jokes hilarious,” says Sayer. “Harold Lloyd hanging off a clock, and a lot of Buster Keaton stuff. In our shows there are a few homages, if you will, to silent comedy.”

His dinner lady and caretaker grandparents had stacks of Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin videos, he says. More recently Sayer remembers fondly the stuck door at the National Theatre press night of Juno and the Paycock starring Sinéad Cusack that caused the show to grind to a halt, which is exactly the kind of thing that happens in Goes Wrong plays.

“Our comedy is quite old-fashioned,” agrees Shields, “Although Henry does like Friends and Frasier.” “But even Frasier is quite farce-y,” says Henry.

It has been generations since London theatre has seen this much farce. There were the Aldwych Theatre farces of the 1920s and Brian Rix's Whitehall entertainments of the 1950s and 60s. But around the time Ray Cooney's Run For Your Wife installed itself in the West End in the early 1980s Michael Frayn's brilliant meta-farce Noises Off raised the bar. Few productions of farce since have been able to get near, making it awfully difficult to stage pure, knockabout, trouser-denuding, door-slamming romps without insulting the intelligence of modern audiences. Lewis hopes that they can revive the form, albeit in their own vision.

“I think farce in a particular form now feels a bit dated,” he says. Shields offers the sexual innuendo-heavy Carry On series as an example. Though whether the Goes Wrong formula can spawn as many productions remains to be seen. We want to take a break from Goes Wrong and do some other stuff,“ says Shields. ”We're working on this show here,“ he says nodding in the direction of a mock-up poster bearing the title The Comedy About a Bank Robbery.

“It will be more of a classic farce,” says Lewis. “It's set in a bank in Minneapolis in 1958 and is about an escaped convict and his gang who rob a bank and get in over their head.”

The show is due to open in the West End in the spring. As with the Goes Wrong series the trio will be applying rules of comedy learned in the process of writing and performing it, but also taught to them at drama school by the late comedian and director Ken Campbell. They key is to avoid the comedy of stupidity.

“Ken used to say silly plus silly equals stupid,” remembers Lewis. “You don't want things to be stupid. You do want things to be silly. It's important for the Goes Wrong plays that people play them straight. A huge problem we have in auditions is that people try to be funny. There's nothing less funny than someone trying to be funny. Our characters are people who take themselves very seriously. Serious plus silly equals funny.”

Whatever the formula, the combination of broad gags and set pieces provided a moment in rehearsals when the calm professionalism of the show's cast, deputy stage manager (Tom Platt) and director (Adam Meggido) was punctuated by a journalist (me) laughing with abandon at the unfolding chaos of two actors attempting to stay in character as their play's world falls apart.

“Everyone has been embarrassed and everyone has tried to get out of that embarrassing situation by doing something that they wish they hadn't,” says Lewis.

“If you see someone trip over in the street, the funny thing is not them falling over but how they respond and try to hide it,” says Shields. “Because deep down everyone is a clown.”

'Peter Pan Goes Wrong' is at Apollo Theatre, London (0844 482 9671) to 31 January