NORTHVILLE, MI – Tipping Point here will open The Play That Goes Wrong on Feb 3, and will run through March 6.

The play, by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields of Mischief Theatre Company, debuted in 2012 and won Best New Comedy at the 2015 Laurence Olivier Awards.

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

The fictitious Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society (Cornley University in the American version), 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.

The script was written by the fictitious Susie H. K. Brideswell. During the performance, a play within a play, a plethora of disasters befall the cast, including doors sticking, props falling from the walls, and floors collapsing. Cast members are seen misplacing props, forgetting lines, missing cues, breaking character, having to drink white spirit instead of whisky (paint thinner in the U.S. production), mispronouncing words, stepping on fingers, being hidden in a grandfather clock, and being manhandled off stage. One cast member is knocked unconscious, and her replacement (the group technician) refuses to yield when she returns. In another scene, an actor repeats an earlier line of dialogue, cuing the other actors to repeat the whole dialogue sequence, ever more frenetically, several times. The climax is a tribute to a scene in Buster Keaton‘s film Steamboat Bill, Jr., when virtually the whole of the remaining set collapses.

Watch the video by Tipping Point Artistic Director James Kuhl.