Four old friends sit down for a quiet evening together. But they are harassed by various bells, sirens, buzzers, warbles, beepers and cheepers, all trying to warn them of something. What are these electronic voices so urgently trying to tell them? Can they understand the mysterious messages before disaster strikes? It’s a race against time — because there are seven more plays and twenty more characters still to come before the evening is through, plus a lot more strange noises — and increasingly desperate calls from eleven separate pay-phones…

Michael Frayn’s Alarms and Excursions takes a hilarious look at society’s tortuous relationship with modern technology. Exposing how comically baffling new fangled machinery can be in its dealings with us, and the double-edged relationship we maintain with the tools which aim to stimulate progress – but more often than not leave us feeling more baffled than when we began.

Michael Frayn is a playwright, novelist and translator whose astonishing body of work includes the novels The Tin Men (Somerset Maugham Award), Headlong (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Spies (winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year), and the plays Noises Off, Benefactors and Copenhagen (winner of both an Evening Standard award and a Tony Award).

Following an acclaimed revival of Frayn’s HERE in 2018, Greenwich Theatre now reunites with the incomparable writer for an unforgettable evening of comedy and ideas.