When Everything Wrong is RIGHT

It’s one thing to laugh when you’re meant to, but quite another to laugh in the tragic moments. That gave them the germ of an idea. What if everything was so dreadful that the audience couldn’t help but laugh AT the actors instead of WITH them? It might just be cathartic if we focused on the misfortunes of others and paid for a ticket to do so.  

And so they created a play within a play and set it in the 1920s, where coarse acting was practically a pre-requisite. The Murder at Haversham Manor was a typical Agatha Christie type thriller that forms the background for everything that goes wrong, but it had to be carefully crafted as though it was a serious production, and then completely destroyed in performance.

They had no idea that their tribute to really bad amateur theatre (most of which is astonishingly good these days) and Michael Green’s book The Art of Coarse Acting would wind up being a panacea for an exhausted world, playing in more than 30 countries continuously for the past decade since it transferred to the West End back in 2014. 

In fact the play had very small beginnings and audiences were scarce. But word of mouth has always been the greatest promotion for theatre of any kind, and certainly the only kind of publicity that the Mischief Theatre company could afford. The play kept evolving, the disasters got bigger, and so did the audiences.

The concept isn’t new. Noises Off, written by Michael Frayn in 1982, was a worthy forerunner. But the world, and his play, were very much gentler then. The two Henrys and Jonathon decided to not just take the idea and ‘push the envelope’ but destroy it and replace it with a super dooper express post bag with a built-in energy source that was both indestructible and hilarious. 

Everything that CAN go wrong DOES go wrong, and that’s what makes it so right. Without the total mayhem - spontaneous yet carefully rehearsed - we wouldn’t be reduced to tears of laughter. Once they took away all the restrictions that the fourth wall imposed, it was only a short trip to people falling in the aisles with laughter. 

So, imagine, if you will, a bad play performed by an even worse theatre company, run by a narcissistic legend in his own lifetime, who insists on fulfilling all the creative roles himself, and it isn’t hard to see the spooky similarities between that and Planet Earth 2025.

It takes a special cast to provide ‘fresh’, organized chaos every night, not to mention an inanimate set that arguably works harder to provide laughs than the cast itself. As WC Fields said on his deathbed “Dying is easy … comedy is hard.” 

When the play first opened at the Red Lion pub, the three writers themselves played the main characters. After all, when there are only miniscule audiences and no money to pay the cast, art imitates life as a necessity. But the unimagined success of the play quickly put an end to that scenario. Now, they can count royalties rather than pratfalls.

Joe Kosky is a director’s dream for such a play. Despite years of training as a serious actor, Joe rose to fame as the key element in Auntie Donna, a cult fringe comedy act that put the C into Chaos. Loosely in the mold of Monty Python, Auntie Donna was able to twist the absurd into normal and convince the rest of us we were losing our minds. And yet, there was a strong rehearsal discipline behind every crazy moment, as Joe explains.

“Ballarat Arts Academy was great training but it lacked the reputation of, say, NIDA or WAAPA. We were all pretty earnest about learning our craft, but we soon realized that the opportunities for a full-time career in theatre were few and far between and that we would need to create something independent and ‘in your face’ if we were going to make any inroads professionally."

Spurred on by their admiration for Monty Python and the like, Joe and four classmates, incredibly young and with boundless energy, created the totally nonsensical Auntie Donna, which became an instant hit at the 2011 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

“It looked… we hoped… spontaneous and improvised, but an incredible amount of work went into making it appear like a bunch of guys just goofing around,” Kosky muses. “It was a major steppingstone for me. I had a love for Musical Theatre from the first time I was reluctantly dragged to a musical by my mum. I was hooked on the idea that you could have a career singing and dancing AND acting and dressing up. How cool was that? But it rarely happens that you make it to the main stage in your first show … only in old movies. So, in the meantime we did everything we could to get noticed and somehow built up a cult following.”

When Joe left Auntie Donna (though he still moonlights with them occasionally) he had no idea that he would return to a scene of organized chaos more than a decade later.

“The Play That Goes Wrong needs incredible discipline mentally and physically,” he elaborates. “It must look as though we have no idea what is going to happen, and the rehearsal period has been intense and grueling. It can’t be improvised because there are so many technical cues. It’s precision timing masquerading as spontaneity. Nothing can be left to chance, but everything has to look that way.”

The new cast, a mixture of Australian and New Zealand actors has been “learning on the job” as Joe puts it, throughout rehearsals.

“There’s a stunt man to show us how to take the numerous falls without doing damage. Every fall is choreographed but there’s always a chance of something going wrong that wasn’t actually meant to,” he says. I think I know what he means!

Joe continues, “And we even had to learn the entire play ‘The Murder at Haversham Manor’ that we are supposed to be performing before it all goes wrong so that we understood what SHOULD have been happening, but wasn’t. There’s been meticulous attention to detail and strangely knowing what SHOULD have been frees us all up for the things that become disasters. It’s a great ensemble piece and it’s been a joy rehearsing with the New Zealand actors.”

After this extensive Australasian tour Joe hopes to return to Musical Theatre, so I asked him what his dream role in any musical would be.

He took a few moments to think about it.

“I’d have to say Sweeney Todd, because physically I’m almost there, and it’s such a great role,” he tells me. Then he takes a moment to rethink “Or perhaps Mama Rose in Gypsy? Now THERE’s a role, but I’d probably have to shave off the beard.”

But for the next few months at least he will be doing everything he can to be truly terrible on stage, in the best way possible.

And he promises, “It’s the most debaucherously manic laugh-out-loud experience you will ever have in the theatre.”

I’m sure he’s not wrong about that.