The Play That Goes Wrong

The Play That Goes Wrong
Official artwork for the West End production transfer to the Duchess Theatre
Written by	Henry Lewis Jonathan Sayer Henry Shields
Date premiered	2012 (2012)
Place premiered	Old Red Lion Theatre
Original language	English
Genre	Comedy
Official site

The Play That Goes Wrong is a play by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields. They are all part of the Mischief Theatre Company.

It won Best New Comedy at the 2015 Laurence Olivier Awards.

Mischief Theatre Company have also written Peter Pan Goes Wrong which opened at London's Apollo Theatre in December 2015 and starred the original cast from The Play That Goes Wrong.

Before the play starts the audience see the backstage staff doing last-minute adjustments to the set, including trying to mend a broken mantlepiece, and to find a dog that has run off.

The fictitious Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, fresh from such hits as The Lion and The Wardrobe, Cat, and James and the Peach or James, Where's your Peach?, has received a substantial bequest and is putting on a performance of The Murder at Haversham Manor – a 1920s murder mystery play, similar to The Mousetrap, which has the right number of parts for the members. During the production a plethora of disasters befall the cast including: doors sticking; props on the walls falling down; floors collapsing. Cast members are seen misplacing props; forgetting lines (in one scene an actor repeating an earlier line results in the same dialogue being repeated, ever more frenetically, several times); missing cues; having to drink white spirit instead of whisky; mispronouncing words; stepping on fingers; being hidden in a grandfather clock; and being manhandled off stage with one cast member being knocked unconscious and her replacement (and the group technician) refusing to yield when she returns. The climax is a tribute to a scene in Buster Keaton's film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), when virtually the whole of the remaining set collapses.

The play premiered at the Old Red Lion Theatre in London in 2012, moved to Trafalgar Studios in 2013, and opened to the Duchess Theatre in the West End on 14 September 2014, where it will remain until at least February 2018.