The Play That Goes Wrong

Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne
Reviewed on Wednesday September 3, 2025

Last month I had the privilege of reviewing Dial M For Murder. In my enthusiastic critique, I opined how whodunnits were making a fashionable comeback.

Earlier this week, The Play That Goes Wrong flipped this highly respectable, straight-faced genre completely on its head. Think The Mousetrap meets Fawlty Towers designed for shameless belly laughs, and you’ll quickly get the idea.

Of all the entertainment options out there, live theatre is potentially the most exciting medium of all. Actors walk that tightrope into the great unknown every time they perform, totally reliant on their own muscle memory and a fastidiously rehearsed support team.

Plays and musicals are scrupulously planned, plotted and scripted from Day One. But like the proverbial iceberg, what an audience sees unfolding on stage is only a small part of the process.

(Years ago, an acquaintance involved in a local large-scale production, showed me how much one evening’s running sheet deviated from the actual outcome. Fortunately, everything still ran smoothly. Yet, saying it takes a village to keep their freight train from coming squarely off the rails is a massive understatement.)

The Play That Goes Wrong works on this theory and more.

Using a humble amateur society’s latest presentation as bait, audiences are in for the ride of their lives. Their intended story, The Murder at Haversham Manor, is secondary to the actual viewing experience.

What we witness instead is every company’s worst occupational health and safety nightmare. With chaotic hilarity flying thick and fast, some of the show’s standout moments include:

  • Disappearing props
  • Set malfunctions
  • Missed lighting and sound cues
  • Fourth walls being broken left and right
  • Last minute replacements as the show is in progress
  • Actors forgetting their lines, suffering from extreme stage fright, losing their scripts, or delightfully hamming up the moment

The list goes on.

In short, only an unmitigated disaster this epic takes an expert company to succeed. The Play That Goes Wrong proves once and for all how professional performers (and crews) are indeed elite athletes. This is a trust exercise of the highest order.

The experienced cast of eight quickly build and establish their characters from the get-go. Securing the manic energy required across the show’s two fifty-minute, jam-packed acts is true testament to their impressive, committed stagecraft.

Ramped up to eleven, this writer hasn’t laughed so much in his life.

Highlights of this ingenious play within a play include:

  • Olivia Charalambous (as Annie), the frazzled stage manager thrust squarely into the limelight. Finding her worth as an actor and determined to stay there, she revels in every delicious moment.
  • Edmond (Eds) Eramiha (as Trevor), the hapless sound and lighting technician, is more interested in his phone alerts than keeping track of the action in front of him. An active catalyst to the show’s eventual undoing, he too is called into active duty.
  • Tom Haward (as Dennis), Haversham Manor’s stock butler, who sends cast members into a merry, endless roundabout after he can’t keep track of his dialogue.
  • Stephanie Astrid John (as Sandra), getting far more than she bargained for as every community theatre’s leading diva. When Sandra’s star status becomes threatened, her hysterical showdown with Annie must be seen to be believed.
  • Joe Kosky (as Robert), the leading man sent down a prop-laden rabbit hole from which there is no apparent escape.

  • Brodie Masini (as Jonathan), the titular victim who keeps springing into miraculous life.

  • Sebastiano Pitruzzello (as Max) treads the boards with impish charm, delighting viewers (and dismaying his peers) with equal aplomb.

(Understudies are listed as Jack Buchanan, Anthony Craig, and Kira Josephson.)

For readers planning to see The Play That Goes Wrong for themselves, my advice would be to take your seat as soon as the auditorium doors open.

Prior to the actual show, the cast roams the venue, doing some last-minute vacuuming, maintenance, scenery touch ups and impromptu birthday celebrations. Immediately setting the pace and tone for things to come, several opening night audience members were roped into helping as well.

You have been warned!

Co-written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, their hit franchise has been running on London’s West End since 2012. (Besides the current Australian revival, international tours include productions in Regional UK, Mainland USA, Chicago, Off-Broadway and Broadway.)

Original direction (Mark Bell), associate direction (Anna Marshall), set design (Nigel Hook), lighting design (Rick Mountjoy), sound design (Andy Johnson), music (Rob Falconer), fight and movement coordination (Dave Hearn) and costume design (Roberto Surace) are crucial to this operation. Working in perfect tandem, these unifying elements are key to The Play That Goes Wrong’s inevitable collapse.

(The laser-sharp 2025 Australian Season credits its resident director as Nick Purdie, with resident lighting design from Jason Bouvaird.)

Playing for a strictly-limited schedule at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre until September 28, the tour continues to Port Macquarie (October 23 – 25), Canberra (October 28 – November 2) and Perth (November 7 – 16).

As someone who is a sucker for YouTube theatrical mishap and blooper compilations, I cannot think of a more satisfying night out. For a journey that promises to fall apart by the seams at any given moment, The Play That Goes Wrong delivers in spades.

Don’t miss it!