Noises Off

“It’s no good you going on. I can’t open sardines and answer the phone. I’ve only got one pair of feet.”

This is the first line of the play within a play, Nothing On, spoken by the character Mrs. Clackett. The substitution of feet for hands starts off the humorous wordplay. The fact that she’s talking to the phone, personifying it through the pronoun “you,” is also comical. Furthermore, this establishes Dotty as the lead actress in the show. She is the one who gets the first line and who—the reader later learns—invests her own money in the show.

“Only she isn’t holding the newspaper.”

This quote is an example of the structure of Act I. The text of Nothing On is in text boxes, and this line—where Dotty diverges from the script—is placed outside the text boxes. It is also italicized because it is a stage direction in Noises Off.

“Listen, Dotty, your words are fine, your words are better than the, do you know what I mean?”

Here, Garry alludes to the annotated script, which is called “the book” in actor parlance, but he doesn’t name it outright. His argument that Dotty’s improvisations are funnier than Housemonger’s text is reflected in the comedy of Noises Off. Its humor banks on the idea that failing to deliver Housemonger’s lines, and improvising new lines, is funnier than the play within a play. Garry forgetting the words “the book” foreshadows the disintegration of the Nothing On script as Noises Off progresses.