Trying to Wring Order from Chaos
Chaos reins as the players try to pull of a performance where it seems that everything that can go wrong does. The very nature of farce calls into question the farcical idea that man has or can control events. What will be will be and no amount of crazed attempts to hold it all together will make it what it was intended to be. Instead, the play suggests that rather than trying to impose order on chaos, the only way to master chaos is to adapt and change.
Metafiction
In addition to the grand tradition of farce, Noises Off also engages another dramatic convention: the show-within-a-show. This is a literary device that writers turn to primarily for the express purpose of allowing characters (or sometimes just the audience) to examine their own situation through the lens of the fiction they are watching. From “The Mousetrap” in Hamlet to “Itchy and Scratchy” on The Simpsons, this has long been a means for introducing a meta-textual component to the narrative and Noises Off takes it to the extreme by essentially telling its story and its story-within-a-story concurrently and throughout.
Performance is Only Half the Show
On its most basic thematic level, the play offers a glimpse behind the curtain—literally—to provide an audience with insight into how every single live performance they attended is only half the show. A real life “Noises Off” takes place every time a theater stages a play though fortunately for most things usually don’t go off the rails to quite the same degree. Nevertheless, through this example of the extremity of what can go wrong, audiences are enlightened to some degree on extent to which the half of the show they never see is vital to ensuring their enjoyment of the half of the show they do see.
