Liza Goddard back in Chichester, a venue she loves

Liza Goddard is delighted that it brings her back to Chichester Festival Theatre from Tuesday-Saturday, January 9-13, a place which has long been a favourite venue of hers: “I absolutely love Chichester. The last thing I did there was Relatively Speaking which was maybe six or seven years ago and for this one we're having to have an extra week’s rehearsal so that we can reconfigure the show for the Chichester stage. It will make a lot of difference to us but it won't make a lot of difference to the audience!

“The first time I went to Chichester was with my father to see Laurence Olivier when he played Othello. That was just unbelievable and that's why I wanted to be on that stage. The power of the performance was just enormous, and Maggie Smith was his Desdemona. I also saw The Royal Hunt Of The Sun and I saw Joan Plowright’s St Joan. It was just electric. It really was the most extraordinary atmosphere. You could almost have cut it with a knife.”

As for Noises Off, Chichester will be the company's first show back after Christmas having toured for 15 weeks through the autumn: “It has been amazing. It is just the most wonderful play. I just love this play but it's very hard work and we're all exhausted! There's an awful lot of running around. I've done quite a few farces and there is just something about them. There's just nothing better than making hundreds of people really belly-laugh for two hours. It's the most extraordinary experience. You're so involved with the audience and people are rolling around in the aisles just absolutely loving it and laughing all the time. And the point is that it's also such a clever play. It's a send-up of the good old-fashioned farces some of which I've been in over the years. I did one called Don't Pinch The Teaspoons and that was dreadful, absolutely terrible!”

Alongside Matthew Kelly and Simon Shepherd and directed by Lindsay Posner, Liza offers a play which will hurtle along at breakneck speed, Noises Off following the on and off-stage antics of a touring theatre company as they stumble their way through the fictional farce Nothing On.

“The fact that it is called Nothing On tells you something about it! But actually farce is one of the most difficult things. People are so sniffy about people that do comedies but it is such a challenge. We're playing two parts and you've got to play each of those characters for real and completely believe in them but it's also about getting the particular rhythm of farce which is usually a rhythm of three. You absolutely have to do one, two, three and then it will work. If you don't do one, two, three, then it won't.

“I remember when I was doing See How They Run and there was a laugh that I was just not getting for some reason. And Ray Cooney said to me ‘It is because you're taking two steps to the right instead of three.’ And he was right. When I did three steps to the right I got a huge laugh. It made such a difference. Ray had come from that Whitehall farce tradition and he just knew the techniques. It was about the good old days when it was a great thing to be a farceur. It meant that you really knew how the comedy worked.”