May the Farce Be With You (7 page)

‘
One must shake an audience out of its expectations'
–Joe Orton

W
HAT IS IT
with the British and farce? Take this book. I tell someone it's about ‘theatre' and eyes light up as if we're both on an equal intellectual wavelength, somewhere between Radio 4 and
The Guardian
. If I then explain that it's a book about farce, the eyes invariably screw up in a kind of sniffy cringe, as if I'm one of those uncultured types who have their iPod at full blast on a bus while reading
The Sun
.

On the other hand, that same person would more than likely describe how they fell about laughing at
One Man, Two Guvnors
, the heavily farce-influenced comedy that went from the National Theatre to the West End and ended up on Broadway complete with raves from
The Guardian
(‘one of the funniest productions in the National Theatre's history') and
The Sun
.

There is another, more frequent response: mention the f-word to non-regular theatregoers and you get a blank stare. Or, ‘Oh, you mean the
Carry On
films?'.
Or someone said: ‘What, like
Gavin and Stacey
?'. Not surprising really, considering that stage farce doesn't come within most people's radar these days. Look up British Comedy on Wikipedia and you'll find links to everything from Ealing Comedies and
ITMA
to
Beyond Our Ken
and
Smack the Pony
. Farce doesn't get a look-in. But then neither does any stage comedy. No wonder entire generations have grown up to think of theatres as comedy deserts.

As a genre, farce has always tended to straddle popular approval by the mass of theatregoers and snooty disdain by the intelligentsia. It goes with the territory. If a crowd-puller like Plautus occasionally got the thumbs down from the cultural elite in Ancient Rome, then so did the great modern farceurs like Brian Rix and Ray Cooney, whose work at the Whitehall Theatre and beyond has been relentlessly stereotyped as synonymous with everything that's crude, old-fashioned and politically incorrect.

Farce, and popular British entertainment in general, often undergoes one of its periodic ‘rediscoveries' by people who see themselves as cultured, or by arts journalists who've probably never actually seen a farce, usually whenever plays by the likes of Orton, Ayckbourn, Feydeau, Pinero or Travers are revived. You've got to laugh. I remember being surrounded by
rows of Radio 4
Front Row
types splitting their sides at Mark Rylance in the 2007 revival of
Boeing-Boeing
at the Comedy Theatre, who wouldn't have been seen dead guffawing at the original production at the Apollo Theatre in the Sixties, at a time when Orton was taking farce conventions to another level of artistry and Peter Shaffer's
Black Comedy
and John Mortimer's version of
A Flea in Her Ear
were National Theatre sensations.

Is it simply snobbery or good old cultural elitism that has driven so many perfectly decent Anglo-Saxon farces into a cul-de-sac called mindless, or simply a question of different types of audiences, as Simon Trussler suggested in a 1966
Plays and Players
magazine survey of a perceived farce renaissance at that time: ‘The intelligentsia, self-created or otherwise, may understand
Loot
because they share its moral assumptions – but they will only go to the Whitehall as a quaint relic of modish pop culture. The staple Whitehall audience, on the other hand, will ignore fashion, either ignore
Loot
or hate it, and not even try to book for
Black Comedy
, through a total identification of the National Theatre with an exclusive sort of highbrow art.'

Half a century later, highbrow attitudes to farce haven't changed all that much, except that those lowbrows and no-brows who still identify theatre in general with narrow exclusivity probably prefer to go
out to see blockbuster musicals or stay at home and laugh at
Mrs Brown's Boys
or
Benidorm
on TV, while the intelligentsia convince themselves that it's cool to go raking through the quaint relics of popular live theatre and claim them as their own in broad comedies like
One Man, Two Guvnors
.

Amidst all of this, farce finds itself in a funny position. The word farce appears in newspaper headlines almost daily, usually to describe the latest political farrago or, more often than not, as a euphemism for an almighty cock-up. But, ironically, although the word farce might be in common media usage, it is not an integral part of the common everyday language of theatre that it was up to only a few decades ago when farces were a mainstay of the West End and regularly performed by rep companies and touring outfits or pulling in the crowds for entire summer seasons.

For fans of farce, this is curious. In a world where sex is on everybody's lips and when the headlines are all about the rich, the powerful and the respectable up to their necks in blatant political corruption, you might have imagined that an up-to-speed contemporary farce would be the perfect medium to get us through hard times. As
The Times
critic Irving Wardle once said: ‘The miracle of farce is that it represents a spectacle of human greed, cruelty and lies which sends you out of
the theatre feeling the world is a good place'. Or should we just leave it to the improv mockers on
Mock the Week
.

So is a centuries-old genre in danger of petering out, or at least becoming a kind of dotty elderly relation of theatre? The main thing about stage farce today is that nobody writes them. Well, certainly not like they used to write them in the past. Naturally, broad comedies and light comedies regularly come and go, but a major production of an entirely original farce is as rare as a frog in a crinoline.

Shakespeare's
The Comedy of Errors
, Frayn's
Noises Off
and major productions of the obvious output of Orton, Wilde or Ayckbourn are in a narrow band of regular farce revivals, with the odd Pinero or Travers popping up from time to time. The classic crowd-pleasers were never written with posterity in mind. If they have become classics it's not just because they are funny costume plays from another era, but because the flawed human frailties they depict are timeless. Yet the one theatrical genre that thrives on tapping into the taboos of our time has itself become a little bit taboo. I mean, where can you find the successors to Travers, Cooney, Orton and Ayckbourn?

New writing schemes have produced some brilliant playwrights, who use theatre to explore the challenges of contemporary life in interesting and challenging
ways. Yet farce, with its requirement for digging beneath surface reality in a comedic way to reveal our hidden urges, is a no-go zone.

You can see why new, even established, playwrights may prefer to take a different path to comedy fame and fortune and transfer their farcical impulses to other media. Creating a stage farce from scratch is daunting. Apart from the technical demands in terms of plotting, pace, character development, comic business, situation (and just being downright funny), the ability to rewrite again and again until the clockwork ticks along nicely is essential – and that can be scary.

Even a highly experienced actor/sit-com writer like Peter Tilbury (
Birds of a Feather
,
Chef!
) took fright when writing his own original French bedroom farce,
Under the Doctor
, which received its West End premiere in 2001. ‘Farce is a huge comic challenge,' he said just before opening night. ‘Comic construction is fascinating and farce is the most cleverly constructed of all comedies. It's more difficult than anything I've had to write and took far longer. It makes me wake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night with “Oh my God, that bit doesn't make sense”.'

As it turned out, Tilbury's play didn't make enough sense to the audience to get them laughing much beyond the opening night. Paul Taylor of
The Independent
said:
‘The material lacks the momentum and remorseless logic that would allow Fiona Laird's production to take off into delirium. A farce that doesn't make you helpless with laughter is one in need of help.'
Under the Doctor
may have needed emergency treatment, but at least Tilbury was brave enough to give farce his best shot.

To bring about Taylor's ‘helpless laughter', every single moment of a farce has to work. But nowadays there is no farce infrastructure within British theatre where novice farceurs – writers, directors, actors, designers and producers – can work together as a team, or try out ideas with audiences in order to bring a play up to the required level of precision. There is no farce equivalent to the stand-up circuit, or the flourishing off-West End venues where forgotten musicals are lovingly revisited. Farces don't just emerge from one person's head. In the days when the Aldwych and the Whitehall echoed with laughter, the writing and rehearsal process was made easier because there was a continuity of cast and production from one show to the next. Timing and teamwork requires the closest cooperation between writer, director and actor, but there is no permanent company, off-West End or off anywhere, through which to graduate as a player or a playwright.

But even after having tried out a funny idea, who is prepared to go back to the drawing board, add or
remove characters or entire scenes, or completely change the plot, in order to calibrate the meticulous escalation of lunacy that takes farce into the realm of delirium?

Molière more than likely re-jigged his scripts, and we know that Ben Travers at the Aldwych and Brian Rix's Whitehall writers constantly made radical changes, even after plays had officially opened. Rix once revealed that not more than twenty minutes of the original script for
Simple Spymen
remained in the final production. Old skool writer, Ray Cooney, continues to impose huge demands on himself in order to get perfect laughs. Given the colossal creative pressures, perhaps it's no wonder that any writer or actor under thirty with even a sliver of farce in their funny bone now heads straight for television, radio or film.

Meanwhile, comedy itself is changing, the diversity of comedians and types of comedy reflecting the diversity in audiences. Stand-up is big business. Comedy is everywhere. Britain is no longer a nation of shopkeepers but a nation of comedy clubbers. Laughter tracks are in; genuine laughter is out. Observational comedy is in; joke-based comedy is out. In-yer-face verbals are in; double entendres are out. Rude is in; risqué is out. Offensive is in; inoffensive is out.

‘One
must
surprise an audience out of its expectations,' Joe Orton told
Plays and Players
magazine
just after
Loot
had opened in the West End in 1966, two years before the abolition of theatre censorship in England. Not surprisingly, when he was doing his utmost to shock audiences out of their moral rut by getting riotous farcical comedy out of a corpse, sexual deviation, corrupt policemen and the Catholic Church, Orton had plenty of close run-ins with the censor. But like all of the great farce writers before him, the trick was to find ways to subvert the prevailing moral codes through all those traditional farcical contraptions of artful ambiguity, wicked wit, dodgy double meanings and innocent innuendo – all the comedy contraptions that are now no longer ‘in'.

Ben Travers was writing Aldwych farces when sex was even more a mortal sin than it was in the 1960s. As he recalled in a 1975 interview, ‘The whole basis, the motive for everything, was that the characters wanted to go to bed with each other. People had the idea that because the censor objected to it, the public would object to it, which was a false idea. People love to have a near the knuckle laugh.'

Apart from the mirthless politically correct brigade and dangerous religious neo-Nazis, nobody wants censorship to return. Even so, farce only truly thrives on a certain kind of edgy nervous tension between the forbidden and the funny – on taking the audience very
near to the knuckle, yet not near enough to knock them senseless.

Over the centuries, farceurs have sought ever more innovative ways to flex their knuckles and subvert the prevailing social, personal and moral rules, sexual or otherwise. What hope is there for the wannabe twenty-first-century farceur when the required skills are fading fast, when there are no limits to comedy, when there are no rules to subvert, when witty innuendo has been replaced by expletives, or when the neurotic desire to shock and awe an audience into laughter becomes far more important to today's so-called ‘edgy' comedy establishment than comedy itself.

British farce may not be at its wits' end. But it's getting pretty close.

A
Cuckoo in the Nest
(1925) Risqué comedy of misunderstandings, in which a married man and a married woman, who used to be engaged to each other, must share the same room for a night. Ben Travers adapted his 1922 novel as a gap-filler for the Aldwych Theatre team, which already had a smash hit with
Tons of Money
. Travers said he wrote it ‘as a comment, in jaunty form, on the state of the divorce law, which said that any unmarried couple who spent a night together in an hotel must, incontestably, be guilty of adultery.' Catch the 1933 film version, which is virtually a record of the original stage production, to see the Aldwych farceurs in action.

A Fish Called Wanda
(1988) No wonder this ‘tale of murder, lust, greed, revenge, and seafood' is one of the funniest British films of all time: John Cleese wrote the script and directed alongside Ealing Comedies veteran Charles Crichton. Cleese has acknowledged a debt to the great French farceurs: ‘There was a time when I used to go to the National Theatre regularly, and they would
do very, very good French farces, particularly Feydeau, and I just admired them hugely, because they were wonderfully funny. First, the emotions in farce are more intense than they are in ordinary comedy, and the result is that there's more energy, and therefore bigger laughs at stake. When you combine that with the intellectual perfection of the clockwork, it's profoundly satisfying.'

A Flea in Her Ear
(1907) Georges Feydeau at the height of his farcical powers. Hellishly cruel comedy, funny foreigners, speech impediments, mistaken identities, revolving beds, rampaging husbands, lusty servants, mayhem, misunderstandings – plus a good deal of hopping in and out of the sheets at the appropriately named Hotel Coq d'Or. John Mortimer's adaptation for the National Theatre production in 1966, directed by the Comédie-Française's Jacques Charon, is still the benchmark English translation. Mortimer's ubiquitous definition of farce aptly sums up the entanglements of Feydeau's adulterous and avaricious worthies in
fin-de-siècle
Paris as ‘tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute'. Rex Harrison and Rosemary Harris starred in the 1968 film, also directed by Charon. It's not funny for one minute.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
(1962) Plautus-inspired musical romp woven around an inspired score by Stephen Sondheim and hilarious book
by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart proves that music and farce can go together, like comedy and tragedy. A right Roman laugh-a-thon.

An Italian Straw Hat
(1851) Eugène Labiche and Marc Michel's surrealist nightmare. A missing hat, a lady's honour at stake, a bewildered wedding-party in pursuit, an endless stream of comic misunderstandings... Many comedians and directors have acknowledged their debt to Labiche, including Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis. The 1927 silent movie version directed by René Clair is a film comedy classic. Also adapted as a musical and a ballet.

The Bear
(1888) Chekhov's early short plays are based on his stories, succinct little one-act farces, or ‘Vaudevilles', with a typical tragi-comic feel to them.

The Bed Before Yesterday
(1976) Shortly before his 90th birthday, Ben Travers revisited farce and became a Seventies swinger with this sex comedy minus the double meaning and innocent innuendo of his earlier work. Rarely revived.

Bedroom Farce
(1975) Alan Ayckbourn in typical farcical mode at a housewarming party, where four married couples who are at different stages in their relationships find their lives intersect over the course of a chaotic evening.

Black Comedy
(1965) Ingenious groundbreaking one-act farce by Peter Shaffer. A fuse blows, but the blackout effect is reversed. The actors think they are in the dark, but the action is seen in full-on white light, so the audience sees them bumping into the furniture.

Boeing-Boeing
(1962) Marc Camoletti's sexy air-hostess farce requires no less than seven doors, three fiancées and at least three different overnight airline bags. ‘It's geometrical,' says the philandering Bernard, explaining the way he organises his love life by airline timetables, ‘so precise as to be almost poetic.' The same can be said of Camoletti's stratospheric script. Full of sexy goings-on in a French farmhouse, Camoletti's
Don't Dress For Dinner
(1987) is the sequel to
Boeing-Boeing
– and it's just as funny-funny.

Box and Cox
(1847) John Maddison Morton was the Eric Sykes of mid-Victorian Britain, writing genuinely popular comedy, often with a surreal edge. This one-act farce is one of his finest and most performed. In 1928 it became the first complete play to be televised by the BBC. See also Morton's
A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion
(1849), an artfully conceived one-act ‘Comic Interlude' in which Mr Snoozle arranges a day at home to himself only to find his cozy Victorian world turned topsy turvy by a mad interloper. Goonery of the first order.

Can't Pay? Won't Pay
! (1974) Dario Fo, a Nobel Prize winner and Italy's most celebrated comic playwright and performer, depicts what happens when people refuse to pay spiralling prices in the shops, a kind of fast and furious supermarket sweep avoiding the checkout. New productions are encouraged to update the puns and parody with topical themes and improvisations. Fo's left field brand of populist farcical comedy owes much to the traditions of the
commedia dell'arte
, circus, jesters, minstrels and political clowns.

Charley's Aunt
(1892) Lord Fancourt Babberley impersonates Charley's aunt from Brazil in this hardy perennial of farce. The ‘aunt', of course, behaves outrageously, smoking cigars and pouring tea into old Mr Spettigue's hat. It's been a great role for generations of comedians, the most memorable being Griff Rhys Jones, who won an Olivier Award for it in 1984. Jack Benny starred in the 1941 film version. Arthur Askey wore the frock in
Charley's (Big-Hearted) Aunt
in 1940. In a 1969 television adaptation, Danny La Rue was so convincing as the aunt that he entirely blunted the comic point. The musical adaptation,
Where's Charley
, is rarely ever staged professionally, but Auntie herself has never retired from the boards.

Chase Me, Comrade!
(1964) A Russian ballet dancer defects to the West, triggering an hilarious game of
hide-and-seek in which everybody is pretending to be everybody else. This brilliantly constructed Ray Cooney laughter-fest was a tour-de-farce for Brian Rix who spent most of his time onstage going through increasingly desperate disguises, including a naval officer, a ballet dancer, a ten-foot man and a talking tiger-skin. The last of the original Whitehall farces. Still performable. Somebody should revive it.

The Comedy of Errors
. Double trouble in Shakespeare's homage to the Roman comedies of Plautus. See also
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
and listen to Rodgers and Hart's musicalisation,
The Boys from Syracuse
.

The Court Jester
(1956) Danny Kaye stars in the Python-esque story of ‘how the destiny of a nation was changed by a royal birthmark on the royal backside of a royal infant child.'Melvin Frank and Norman Panama's witty screenplay is packed with verbal buffoonery, including the iconic comic routine ‘The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true! Right?'

Dad's Army
(1968-1977) Jimmy Perry and David Croft's scripts for the Walmington-on-Sea platoon of the Home Guard commanded by pompous Captain Mainwaring are full of inspired farcical situations. See
Episode 56, in which Mainwaring's platoon is detailed to guard a captured U-Boat captain and crew.

Dry Rot
(1954) John Chapman's rollicking post-war comedy about bent bookmakers switching race-horses involves heads popping unexpectedly from secret doors and falling trousers a-plenty. The second of the Whitehall farces, it's one of the very few farces in the National Theatre's
NT2000
list of significant twentieth-century plays.

She's Done It Again
(1969) The very best of three anarchic farces written by Michael Pertwee for Brian Rix, it involves a financial scandal and multiple pregnancies. The great Harold Hobson praised its ‘delicious and delirious qualities'. Pertwee followed up with the equally inventive
Don't Just Lie There, Say Something
and
A Bit Between the Teeth
.

Donkey's Years
(1976) Michael Frayn's university reunion comedy turns into a classic bedroom farce involving a cabinet minister. A precursor to Frayn's love letter to farce,
Noises Off
.

Duck Soup
(1933) The Marx Brothers produced a lot of movies and one comedy masterpiece. This is it.

Fawlty Towers
(1975 and 1979) Only two series and twelve episodes, but the cleverly plotted and superbly choreographed comic complications endured by Basil, Sybil, Manuel and co (and their creators John Cleese
and Connie Booth) showed how farce on television can fit perfectly into the traditions of the very best on stage.

Frasier
(1993-2004) Writer Joe Keenan must have had Feydeau in mind when he wrote ‘The Ski Lodge' episode of
Frasier
in which Frasier, Niles and the family become embroiled in what turns into a helter-skelter bedroom farce. But then the entire series maintained farce at its heart.

The Frogs
(405 BC) Aristophanes had plenty to croak about in his day, but this Athenian entertainer's comedies are infrequently performed today.

The Front Page
(1928) Probably the best American farce of the 1920s, in which Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht take satirical sideswipes at a pack of scheming journalists and big city corruption. In fact it was so good they filmed it thrice, the 1940 Howard Hawks version re-titled as
His Girl Friday
.

Government Inspector
(2011) David Harrower's new version of the Gogol masterpiece, directed by Richard Jones for the Young Vic, deleted the ‘The' from the original title and turned a small-town satire into a full-strength Vodka-fuelled hallucinatory farce teetering on the brink of insanity.

I Love Lucy
(1951-1957) Time and time again the all-time comedy genius that was Lucille Ball gets herself
embroiled in farcical situations in one of the greatest sitcoms ever to come out of American television.

The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895) With a handbag bulging with clever lines, puns, epigrams and repartees, Oscar Wilde employed farce as a façade for poking fun at Victorian values. A work of genius.

The Ladies Man
(1961) Hardly any nutty gurning here from Jerry Lewis as the handyman at a ladies-only boarding house, but lots of superb slow-burn film comedy, inventive sight gags and farcical set-piece routines, culminating in a ballroom dance with a grim-faced George Raft.

Lend Me A Tenor
(1986) Ken Ludwig's backstage farce brings chaos, double entendres, scantily clad young women and zany mayhem to the world of provincial opera. A musical adaptation slowed down the farcical comedy but musically hit the right notes.

La Cage aux Folles
(1973) Rediscover Jean Poiret's original play about what happens when a drag queen and his night club-owning ‘husband' cover up their relationship to try and appear respectable. It spawned the gloriously funny film, two not quite so funny sequels, a mediocre Hollywood remake and the brilliant stage musical.

Le Dîner de Cons
(1998) Superb movie version of Francis Veber's 1993 smash-hit farce, in which a group
of urbane Parisians amuse themselves by inviting a series of nerds to dinner. Ronald Harwood translated the original play in 2002, re-titled
See You Next Tuesday
, but it was no match for the film.

Let's Get a Divorce
(1880) Victorien Sardou was a successful French dramatist, though his well-made plays are seldom performed any more. Bernard Shaw coined the word ‘Sardoodledom' to describe them. This one flirts like mad with the marriage-go-round and is still perky enough to be revisited.

Loot
(1965) Joe Orton's first real attempt at farce started out on tour as a disaster but eventually ended up as a successful tour-de-force of bad taste brilliance and funereal humour. Unhappy with the original cast and direction, Orton wrote to his producer ‘Ideally, it should be nearer
The Homecoming
than
I Love Lucy
. Don't think I'm a snob about
I Love Lucy
. I've watched it often. I think it's very funny. But it's aimed purely at making an audience laugh. And that isn't the prime aim of
Loot
.'

The Magistrate
(1885) Arthur Wing Pinero's nimble plot tilts at Victorian values by sending a compromised Establishment figure – a nice old metropolitan magistrate – through a moral mangle after he unwittingly visits a dubious hotel.

Noises Off
(1982) The double whammy farce-inside-a-farce by Michael Frayn where offstage is even crazier than onstage and backstage is full of back-stabbing actors and stage managers. Done with the right level energy, it's a riotous celebration of the old showbiz adage that come what may, ‘the show must go on'. The play premiered in 1982, but Frayn has since rewritten it several times.

No Sex Please, We're British
(1971) As if to prove there is a wall of cultural snobbery built around popular farce, Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott's cracking comedy about an ordinary young couple caught up in a pornography scandal was panned by the critics but ran and ran in the West End.

One for the Pot
(1956) This top-notch Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton laughter machine is still a Rolls-Royce of farces, involving an inheritance claim and a seemingly endless tangle of mistaken identities and hilarious confusions.

One Man, Two Guvnors
(2011) Farcicality and the
commedia dell'arte
conventions are constantly popping up in Richard Bean's ingenious 1960s reworking of Goldoni's
The Servant of Two Masters
, complete with a doddery old servant and a frenzied slapstick food-serving scene.