About the work
The Play That Goes Wrong is a comedy by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, premiered in 2012 in London. The piece depicts an amateur theatre group whose performance of a murder mystery spectacularly spirals out of control.
Plot
The fictional Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society performs the murder mystery "Murder at Haversham Manor". From the very start everything goes wrong: props fall apart, sets collapse, actors forget their lines and the technology fails across the board. The actors desperately try to save the performance but make the situation worse with every attempt at rescue. The chaos escalates until the complete collapse of the set. At the end the entire scenery lies in ruins.
Cultural significance
The Play That Goes Wrong is a worldwide comedy success that has carried the tradition of British slapstick humour into the present. The piece celebrates the universal comedy of failure and has given the genre of the "meta-comedy" on the theatre stage fresh impetus.