About the work
Chaos auf Schloss Haversham — known in English as The Play That Goes Wrong — is a comedy by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, the founders of the British company Mischief Theatre. It premiered on 4 December 2012 at the fringe venue The Old Red Lion in London, directed by Mark Bell.
Plot
An amateur troupe, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, attempts to stage a classic 1920s-style English country-house murder mystery. Almost as soon as the show begins, sets, props and cues start to go wrong, yet the cast doggedly carries on regardless. The comedy grows out of the collision between the earnest whodunit and the escalating on-stage chaos.
Cultural significance
After its success at the Old Red Lion, a two-act version transferred to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End in 2014 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. In German-speaking theatres it circulates under several titles, including Mord auf Schloss Haversham (its German-language premiere in Hof in 2016) and Chaos auf Schloss Haversham (Frankfurt).