by Roger Foss
Compared with the naughty French, British farces seem to be rather more innocent – sex comedy without the sex maybe. Are you consciously careful to avoid being too explicit?
When I first started writing we were always aware of the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. You were only allowed one ‘bloody’ in a play. You just took censorship for granted and, let’s be honest, One for the Pot and Chase Me, Comrade! are both very unsexy – although we made up for that with Not Now Darling in which sex is talked about a lot – and by the time we get to Two into One you do actually see them in bed together. In a funny way, although it has now eased up for writers and there are no limits, it has somehow made a lot of comedy very offensive – anything goes these days.
But if there are no limits to what’s said in comedy, doesn’t that make farce impossible to write?
I’d agree that it has become much more difficult to hit upon a basic premise. Even so, the dubious morality of the powerful and of politicians has always been good for farce and probably always will be. And getting married is still the basic thread of everything that happens outside of our working existence and family and friends. Alan Ayckbourn is still very clever at taking hold of domestic scenes and spinning them out.
New writing is encouraged today, but new writers don’t seem to want to write new farces. Has farce gone out fashion?
The comedy writing focus has gone towards television. That’s where the talent is now. It is very difficult for the kids who are starting out to forward their careers solely in the theatre. And it’s probably much easier to revive classic farces from the past than to sit down and write something completely fresh and original. Most of the farceurs of my generation were also actors who learned to write farces by appearing in them. It’s not possible to serve that kind of apprenticeship any more. Perhaps our only hope is that some young director will get a hold of the classic farces or discover and produce some of the rarely performed ones, and maybe a young writer somewhere will see how genuinely funny they still are and that will spark them into trying to do the same and come up with something new.
Maybe so, but I rarely see farce revivals these days that really work as well as they think they do.
Perhaps the danger is that directors and actors start putting farcical comedy in italics. I remember seeing a production of London Assurance at the National Theatre a few years ago. The director’s approach was to get the actors to step outside of the play and give the audience a wink. You couldn’t get involved in it. They wanted to say: ‘this is the style’, which meant you didn’t really care about the characters or the predicaments they were in. Mind you, it didn’t seem to worry two-thirds of the audience who were quite happy to laugh at the nudges and the winks and the asides.
Of course you can have a character addressing the audience. But you have to find a way of setting it up. In Not Now Darling, Gilbert Bodley has asides that begin when he opens what you think is a just a door, only to reveal a well-stocked cocktail cabinet. He looks at the audience and says: ‘No office should be without one,’ which establishes that he can make remarks to the audience, now and again but not all the time. It would be a pity to take One For Your Wife and have John Smith nudging the audience. It would get plenty of easy laughs but I wouldn’t accept it. It’s cheapening. Oh well, maybe they’ll be sending up my plays in the future!
By the way, thinking of the likes of Gilbert Bodley and John Smith, I wonder why men are invariably the ones caught in farcical predicaments and not women?
Why men? I haven’t the faintest idea! Except that it’s a very male-dominated existence we all still live in. But in Move Over Mrs Markham it is the two ladies who cook up the plot and in Wife Begins at Forty the play is kicked off by Linda, the suburban housewife, when she begins to question her seventeen years of marriage. In the film of Run For Your Wife I actually think I improved the roles of the two wives.
Having created so much laughter onstage, do you have any theories about what makes people laugh?
I am not really academically driven or theory driven. I never attended any writing or directing classes. I never went to drama school. Comedy came my way and I just assimilated things as I went along. Had I gone on to university I would have written very different plays. All I know is that we are the only animal that has the ability to laugh, even under terrible circumstance. I’m sure that even in the horror of the Holocaust, in those dreadful concentration camps, some prisoners laughed.
I had a letter once from a woman who had been to see Run For Your Wife who said that as soon as she realised the play was about a bigamist she wanted to jump up and run out of the auditorium because she had been caught up in a horrendous bigamous marriage herself. She said she wasn’t able to escape because she was hemmed in on either side of her seat, but in the end she was so pleased that she’d been forced to stay as she ended up laughing as much as everyone around her.
You have produced Joe Orton’s Loot. What do you think of Orton’s use of farce?
I look at Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane and in a way they aren’t believable – it’s as if Joe didn’t really mean it. I think my own comedies are real, with a silly twist to them, whereas with Orton it was always on another darker plane. Very funny, but as if everything is being said in italics.
What do you think of my theory that the post-war period was a golden age of farce?
It certainly was a wonderful period for farce, right the way through to the 1980s. But I suppose fashions come and go. Farce won’t die. Somebody will come along at some time or another and get us all rolling in the aisles again. You only have to see some of the productions in the little off-West End theatres to know that the acting and directing talent is out there. Those are the people who I am sure will one day find farce and reinvigorate it.
Run For Your Wife was listed by the National Theatre as one of the top 100 plays of the 20th century. If the National decided to stage a Ray Cooney farce, which one would you like it to be?
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.
Have you thought of sitting down and writing your autobiography?
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.
Any thoughts of a title?
‘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.
4. The Man Who Made Queen Victoria Giggle
‘Rediscovery is long overdue.’ – Kenneth Tynan
DID 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 Frisette (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.