May the Farce Be With You (5 page)

Two into One
. Set-wise it's more interesting to direct. My wife has just returned from a painting holiday in Italy and they were in a tiny village with a huge ornate theatre where they were doing
Two into One
. But I don't have a favourite. Each play I am working on at any given moment is my favourite.

Lots of people have suggested it. I'd much rather be getting on doing something now rather that writing about what happened in the past. Maybe I should do something in diary form, almost as a matter of history.

‘Would it be funny if…'. That's what actors often say to me during rehearsal, but then they see my face and decide it probably wouldn't be.

‘
Rediscovery is long overdue.' –
Kenneth Tynan

D
ID QUEEN VICTORIA
ever
laugh? For decades, the widowed Queen presented a funereal face in public. She may not have been amused, but her loyal subjects were happily guffawing behind her ramrod back, especially in theatres. In particular, they enjoyed laughing at farce. And they did so with a force that must have cracked many a whalebone corset.

In Victorian show business farce ranked alongside melodrama in the popularity stakes. As the Industrial Revolution turned into an entire way of life, farce became as bankable as muck and brass. The nineteenth century boom in theatre buildings, catering for increasingly urban and artisan audiences as well as the better-off toffs in the posh seats, combined with the growth of touring companies, fostered the wide-scale performance and mass enjoyment of farce.

Farce was in the air, like sulphurous London fog was in the lungs. Farce appeared on virtually every playbill
alongside such pure theatrical Victoriana as ‘comedietta', ‘tragedy', ‘burletta' and ‘burlesque' until at least the 1870s, by which time farce had rapidly morphed from mostly one-act or two-act ‘cup-and-saucer comedy' afterpieces to emerge as the main feature. Most notably the full-length well-crafted ‘knife-and-fork comedy' created by British farceur Sir Arthur Wing Pinero and French farceur Georges Feydeau (whose
Amour et piano
was his first play to be staged in London in 1883), not forgetting Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895) and the single enduring piece by Brandon Thomas, whose hit comedy,
Charley's Aunt
, smashed West End box office records in 1892 and has received countless revivals ever since.

Just like us, late Victorians sat in the dark in theatres and laughed at contemporary farcical situations and dubious human behaviour on stages contained within proscenium frames. Their theatres may have been gas-lit – many of ours have discarded the box set and the fourth wall ‘prosc arch' – but the comic themes were timeless: deceiving husbands trying desperately not to be found out; social upstarts falling flat on their faces; undignified authority figures with disaster hanging over their heads; comic servants on the make.

Then, as now, farces did what Basil Fawlty called ‘the bleedin' obvious' – they made people laugh; they
cheered people up. Farce allowed Victorian audiences to laugh their way through the social danger zones of the Industrial Revolution, to feel a shared twinge of guilt and embarrassment when respectability goes haywire. As Sir Peter Hall said in a 1996 interview just before his new production of Feydeau's
Occupe-toi d'Amélie
opened in the West End, farce ‘allows us to watch the sort of bad behaviour that we could never publicly endorse, but which we secretly know we might be capable of.' Bearing in mind that Victorian moral codes and strict attitudes to sexuality meant that nobody could ever be offended, British farce inevitably steered clear of the scandalous shenanigans that
Belle Époque
French bedroom farces were exploiting with élan and plenty of ooh-la-la beyond the White Cliffs of Dover.

Arthur Wing Pinero was one of the most popular playwrights of the late Victorian era. He wrote 59 plays, including contemporary social dramas and intelligent ‘problem plays' such as
The Second Mrs Tanqueray
(1893) and
The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (
1895). The vast majority of Pinero's dramatic output is either long forgotten, out of print or rarely revived, unlike his meticulously crafted farces written for the Royal Court Theatre –
The Magistrate
(1885),
The Schoolmistress
(1886),
Dandy Dick
(1887)
, The Cabinet Minister
(1890) and
The Amazons
(1893).

Audiences lapped up Pinero's gallery of pillars of the Establishment who are, for one good reason or another, tempted to move beyond their normal dignified social world, only to find themselves committing the most embarrassing indiscretions.
The Magistrate
, influenced by Feydeau's sexy romp
A Little Hotel on the Side
, sees a red-faced metropolitan magistrate embroiled in a naughty night out ending up facing a criminal court appearance. In
Dandy Dick
, the Dean of St Marvell's spends a night in the local prison after placing a bet on a horse to save his crumbling church spire.

According to theatre historian Michael Booth, Pinero's particular achievement in his farces ‘was to launch his characters on a series of fast-moving, improbable but not impossible situations without once treading on the censorious playgoer's toes.' At the time, Pinero's farces were not the period-costumed Victoriana that we see today whenever they are given an airing, but bang-up-to-date comedies peeking behind the social camouflage of ‘decent' people.

Pinero may have diluted the overtly filthy fun of French farce, but his strong influence on the development of the formal structure of the full-length twentieth-century British farce was later acknowledged by Aldwych farceur Ben Travers, who described in his 1956 autobiography
Vale of Laughter
how the discovery of an
old set of Pinero plays had a major effect on his own work.

 

I fell upon them with the rapturous excitement of Ben Gunn lighting upon the treasure of Captain Flint. They were not merely plays to read. Each one of them was a guidebook to the technique of stagecraft. I studied them as such, counting and noting the number of speeches and the method of plot and character development. I discovered for myself the real secret of Pinero's mastery, namely his attention to every line and in every scene the importance of climax.
Stagey old museum pieces they may appear today. But the present-day playwright still relies, for many of his most successful effect, on the rules laid down and illustrated by that old master craftsman.

Just as influential on the development of British farce as we now know it was another eminent Victorian master of the rules of the game. John Maddison Morton (1811-1891), once hailed by Kenneth Tynan as ‘the founding father of British farce', was creating wildly popular stage farces long before Pinero was born. While some of Pinero's farces have ended up as
Antiques Roadshow
theatre, occasionally wheeled out to reveal how their polished comic values can still shine, Morton's vast store
of deftly constructed pre-Pinero rib-ticklers, mostly based on situations that might arise in day-to-day mid-Victorian life, have been consigned to the dusty old world of archivists and academia.

Rarely revived today, his short farces – he wrote around 125 and every top comedy actor of his day appeared in them in theatres across the UK – were invariably performed as afterpieces on a bill or slotted in to the main fare. His plots and themes hit the Victorian funny bone because they were very much
of
the people, usually grounding a gallery of lower-middle-class characters in a familiar domestic reality that invariably goes haywire through a series of misunderstandings, mistaken identities and elaborate plot devices before some semblance of homely normality is eventually restored.

In bidding farewell to the upper-class comfort zone of earlier eighteenth-century farce, Morton took the everyday anxieties of Victorian living and made them funny. Like Pinero
,
Morton happily helped himself to the theatrical inventions of French farceurs, while leaving out the saucy bits. His hilarious
Box and Cox
(1847), which has strong claims to be the most popular of all Victorian farces (Queen Victoria laughed so much that she saw it performed twice), combines the plots of
Une Chambre pour Deux
(1839), by E.F. Prieur and A. Letorzec, and
Frisett
e (1846), by Eugène Labiche and A.
Lefranc, and is subtitled as ‘A Romance in Real Life', flagging-up a spoof of contemporary melodrama.

The premise of the comedy in
Box and Cox
is simple: a money-grabbing lodging housekeeper rents the same room to two men, one occupying it by day and one by night, without either's knowing about the other. John Box, a journeyman printer, is hard at work at a newspaper office all night, and doesn't come home till the morning, while James Cox, a journeyman hatter, is busy making hats all day long, and doesn't come home till night. The landlady gets double rent for the room, ‘and neither of my lodgers are any the wiser for it'. A basic double-trouble situation is expertly contrived by Morton and developed into a truly farcical screwball comedy of mistaken identities, false assumptions and an ever-thickening tangle of misunderstandings.

Morton's delightful farces have been consigned to the lumber-room of British theatre, not because the plays are no good or dated, but because of the British theatre Establishment's depressingly dismissive attitude towards any popular comedy that exists beyond the ‘classic' repertoire.

Morton made Queen Victoria giggle, twice. But his farcical frolics attracted a more broader-based audience for farce than Pinero, Wilde or even
Charley's Aunt
. He poked fun at social conventions. His characters exist in
a mundane world that invariably turns into mayhem. His plots start in the commonplace and escalate into the outer limits of absurdity. His actors were required not only to deliver the real stuff of situation-based farce and quick-fire dialogue, but to connect directly with the audience as themselves, often adding funny ‘tags' at the end to round off the piece.

Can Morton's plays raise a titter today? Even the titles exude a whiff of gas mantles and greasepaint. Typical Morton-esque shorts such as
Lend Me Five Shillings
,
Catch a Weazel
,
A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion
,
Who's my Husband?
,
Slasher and Crasher
,
Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw
,
Wooing One's Wife
and
The Double-Bedded Room
, demand performance skills and disciplined farce techniques which are probably beyond the capability of most contemporary actors and directors.

Believing that a Morton ‘rediscovery is long overdue', Kenneth Tynan brought one of Morton's two-handers,
A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion
, to the National Theatre stage in 1968, as part of a triple bill including a play by John Lennon. Even with a crack cast (Gerald James and a young Derek Jacobi), Morton's glorious depiction of comfy middle class Mr Snoozle looking forward to a peaceful day at home without the family and servants but soon finding himself embroiled in an absurdist comedy of menace worthy of Pinter, was
given the thumbs down by the critics, which probably put paid to any hope of a Morton revival.

In 2011, the little Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond rediscovered the same play and presented it in a triple bill with
Slasher and Crasher
and
Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw
. Staged under the umbrella title
Three Farces
, the production was a resounding success, proving that Morton's humour still works.
The
Guardian'
s Michael Billington praised director Henry Bell's production, ‘which confirms why the Victorians loved farce: in a society that craved stability, order and harmony, it was a way of exorcising their darkest fears and fantasies.' Sam Marlowe in
The
Times
said ‘the cast sparkles as they juggle intricate wordplay with manic stage business'.

For me, watching these wholly delightful plays, it wasn't just the comic choreography, the clever stage business, the running jokes, the disciplined acting or the spiralling-out-of-control plots bringing virtual catastrophe to mid-Victorian characters that shattered my funny bone. It was the sudden realisation of Morton's place in a British comedy lineage that makes him a missing link between Shakespeare's comic muse and music hall and the variety sketch comedy of Fred Karno, Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Jefferson (aka Stan Laurel), continuing all the way through to the Whitehall and post-Whitehall farces and connecting up
with popular sitcom writers such as Eric Sykes, John Sullivan and Galton and Simpson.

As former RSC literary manager Colin Chambers (who researched and edited the plays for the Orange Tree) says in his programme notes, Morton's distinctively English humour ‘points backwards towards the comedy of writers such as Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot and forward towards The Goons, Monty Python and
One Foot in the Grave'
.

In terms of quirky dialogue and the insidious undermining of social norms through farcical humour, ‘Morton-esque' isn't many light years away from ‘Orton-esque'. The rapid entrances and exits, slamming doors, running gags and increasingly anarchic situations in
Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw
, have a direct line to the accumulation of misunderstandings, identity confusions, physical sleights of hand and verbal chicanery in intricately constructed farcical laughter machines such as Philip King's
See How They Run
or in Whitehall farces such as Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton's
One for the Pot
and Cooney and John Chapman's
Chase Me, Comrade!
.

Morton never really laughed all the way to the bank, even though
The New York Times
obituary in 1891 called his
Box and Cox
‘the best farce of the nineteenth century'. When Arthur Sullivan's operetta
Cox and Box
, based on
Morton's bestseller, opened in London in 1869, Morton received no royalties. Ah well, that's show business.

His rumbustious one-act farcical style out of fashion, Morton died virtually penniless in 1891, just two months before Oscar Wilde's
Lady Windermere's Fan
opened at the St James's Theatre in London and one year before the London premiere of
Charley's Aunt
. Morton lived long enough to make Queen Victoria laugh and to see her celebrate her Golden Jubilee. And although Victoria remained in solemn mourning for Prince Albert, maybe somewhere at the back of her mournful mind she could still hear the mirth that
Box and Cox
generated in happier times when she
was
amused.