Out of Order

2008 season · Production archive

When Richard Willey, a government junior minister, plans to spend the evening with Jane Worthington, one of the opposition’s typists, things go disastrously wrong — beginning with the discovery of a dead body trapped in the hotel’s window. Add a conniving waiter, a private detective, an angry wife, a furious husband, a bungling secretary and an unconscious nurse, and you have the perfect recipe for laughter.

Written by

Ray Cooney

Directed by

Joseph Staab

Ran

September 5 – October 4, 2008

Cast

Wade P. Wood · Dell Domnik · Kevin Craft · Fiona Turnbull · Ann K. Flynn · Wade Livingston · Austin Terrell · Seth Maisel · Ellen Long · Amanda Goldrick

About the production

Ten actors is a large company for a room of this size, and Out of Order is the most mechanically demanding thing in the Vic’s archive: a sash window that traps a body, a connecting suite, and a plot that requires people to be in two rooms at once without the audience ever losing track of which is which.

Cooney’s farces are engineered rather than written, and they expose a small stage immediately — there is nowhere to put ten people when eight of them are supposed to be hiding. That the house attempted it at all, in the autumn of its fourth season, is a reasonable measure of how confident the company had become in the room.

What the press said

“America has no real equivalent to Ray Cooney, one of Britain’s masters of farce…audiences have a timeless appreciation for well-crafted yarns that combine the wit of Noel Coward with sexual innuendo and well-timed, physical stage business…a good bit of fun”

“This cast has Out of Order tightly in their artistic grip…Out of Order definitely should not be missed.”

Where it sat in the season

It was production 8 of 10 in the Vic’s 2008 season. It followed Politix: Showbiz on the Powerbiz (Jul 25 – Aug 23, 2008) and was followed by Tales of the Night (Oct 10 – Nov 8, 2008). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.