by Roger Foss
Crucially for farce, the songs in A Funny Thing… never threaten to hold up the situations but tend to suspend the audience and keep them in comic mode, while providing a chance to cool down the laughter muscles. ‘Comedy Tonight’ (‘Something familiar/ Something peculiar... Old situations/New complications...’) sets a tone that continues throughout the entire score, with other comic numbers such as ‘Everybody Ought to Have a Maid’, ‘Lovely’ and ‘I’m Calm’ not only supplying a breathing space between dialogue scenes but also nudging the plot along.
When these stage antics transferred to the big screen in 1966, director Richard Lester discarded both its farcicality and most of its musicality. Lester kept Broadway star Zero Mostel in the lead and brought in comedy veterans Phil Silvers and Buster Keaton and dumped some of the songs, filmed the action on location, adding lots of then-fashionable A Hard Day’s Night cinematic tricksy-ness, and ended up with ‘something peculiar’ – and that’s despite having skilled British stage farceur Michael Pertwee in the writing team.
When it comes to musicalising low comedy, Mel Brooks (with co-author Tom Meehan) undoubtedly pulled a farce one by adapting his first film, The Producers,for the stage and writing a brilliant new score to match his sleazy satire about a dubious Broadway producer deliberately staging the ultimate atrocious-taste musical disaster (Springtime for Hitler) that accidentally becomes box office gold.
Like ‘Comedy Tonight’ in A Funny Thing…, the first two numbers of The Producers, ‘Opening Night’ and ‘The King of Broadway’, establish the comic atmospherics and give the audience a whiff of the brazen and bawdy burlesque business about to follow, when unscrupulous producer Max Bialystock and nervy accountant Leo Bloom scheme to defraud elderly backers to invest in a show that is a dead-cert flop, thereby enabling them to slip off with the loot. Springtime for Hitler becomes a surprise money-spinner but the two are sent to jail where they produce another show with the convicts, Prisoners of Love, which also becomes a hit and sets them on the road to slightly more honest fame and fortune on Broadway.
With its accelerating pace of action and an accumulation of near disasters that befall Max and Leo, The Producers is a prime example of farce and musicality meshed together. There’s a kind of seamless linkage between the comedy and the big brash Broadway-style numbers – a chorus girl dressed in giant pretzels; a line of old ladies doing a tap routine with Zimmer frames; a chorus of tap-dancing Nazis in Springtime for Hitler – so that the entire intricately constructed comedy edifice comes alive even better onstage than it did first time round on the big screen, partly because the theatre audience is complicit in Max’s sleazy moral universe through communal laughter. As theatre critic Mark Shenton shrewdly observed in The Stage newspaper, Brooks’s stage version is ‘a valentine to the art of making theatre itself’.
Brooks himself clearly knew that creating farcical situations and big laughs on a theatrical scale involved more than just slotting in the gags and mad situations around the songs, but required numerous rewrites and revisions, as he revealed in an interview with Esquire magazine: ‘You build a wall of comedy one brick at a time. If something doesn’t work, you’ve got to dismantle the wall and start all over again to make sure the bricks are interfacing and that they architecturally support the idea. The premise has to be solid or the comedy isn’t going to work. When something isn’t working in Act Two, sometimes you have to go back to a reference in Act One that wasn’t developed clearly enough to get the explosion you want later on.’
Lend Me A Tenor, The Musical, Peter Sham and Brad Carroll’s musicalisation of Ken Ludwig’s 1986 madcap backstage farce Lend Me A Tenor, underwent numerous rewrites and workshops after premiering at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2007 and before its short West End run in 2011. Their musical adaptation sticks to the premise of Ludwig’s original cleverly constructed comedy about the zaniness that ensues when the world’s greatest tenor comes to a small Midwestern cultural backwater to save its opera company by singing Verdi’s Otello.
The original play’s farce structure is as solid as Brooks’s wall of laughter – screwball situations involving multiple mistaken identities and an opera house full of mishaps are as furiously paced as anything by Feydeau or Ray Cooney.
But if the potentially explosive comedic value of the musical version loses its firepower in places it’s precisely because, unlike A Funny Thing… and The Producers, the songs and big production numbers throw a jarring brake on the farcical machinery. Just when the opera house mayhem is about to spin out of control, along comes another tap routine or love interest ballad to halt the spiralling action. It’s as if, when rearranging the original script, the co-authors ignored a key rule of farce – however absurd the characters and the situations may be, they must be entirely believable within the crazed logic of the plot.
If La Cage aux Folles sticks glue-like to the crazed logic of the plot it’s probably because book writer Harvey Fierstein and composer Jerry Herman based the musical on the original 1973 gender-bending French stage farce by actor, director and screenwriter Jean Poiret, who co-starred in the hit play when it premiered in Paris in 1973 and also scripted the 1978 film adaptation (which was followed by two mildly funny sequels, La Cage aux Folles 2 and La Cage aux Folles 3: The Wedding and a Hollywood remake, The Birdcage, which was so unfunny it turned laughter into an instrument of torture).
The original production of La Cage aux Folles enjoyed a four-year run on Broadway and a short season in London in 1986, by which time the story of Albin and Georges, two middle-aged homosexual lovers who run a transvestite nightclub in St Tropez, didn’t quite chime with the Aids-panicking times. The escalating plot revolves around the entanglements that develop when Georges’ son announces that he is getting married to the daughter of a local morality crusader. Herman’s sublime score (‘A Little More Mascara’, The Best of Times’, the anthemic ‘I Am What I Am’)gives the comedy line pause for breath, but continues to illuminate characters and their situations.
We had to wait until 2008 to discover and enjoy the full farcical force of this musical. As critic Eric Bentley observed in The Psychology of Farce, danger is omnipresent in all good farce – ‘One touch, we feel, and we shall be sent spinning into outer space.’ Playwright/director Terry Johnson’s small-scale Menier Chocolate Factory production (which later successfully transferred to the West End and Broadway),spun the audience right into the show’s sexual danger zone because his production delivered both the language of musical theatre and the language of farce in equal measure, always pushing the ‘normality’ of life in a St Tropez drag club further and further towards absurdity and culminating in effeminate Albin’s farcical attempt to disguise himself as ‘mother’ when his lover’s son brings home his fiancée’s ultra-conservative parents to meet them.
The worlds of farce and musical theatre have linked hands ever since Aristophanes used a Greek chorus of frisky frogs to debate the merits of plays by Aeschylus and Euripides. If Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were around in Shakespeare’s day, I wouldn’t mind betting the Bard himself would have commissioned them to set The Comedy of Errors to music and call it The Boys from Syracuse. Mozart knew a thing or two about classic farcical plots too. The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutti are farces to the core.
Apart from farce and melodrama, one of the mainstays of Victorian theatre was the burletta – musical farces in three acts with five songs in each. Long before he teamed up with W.S. Gilbert, Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote the score for Cox and Box or, The Long-Lost Brothers based on John Maddison Morton’s popular mid-Victorian farce Box and Cox. In 1948, Where’s Charley? Frank Loesser and George Abbott’s adaptation of Brandon Thomas’ classic Victorian college farce Charley’s Aunt made ‘Once in Love With Amy’ a hit for Norman Wisdom.
More recently, it was fascinating to see how big West End and Broadway musical comedies, such as Betty Blue Eyes and Legally Blonde include hilarious moments where farce-like comedy and music are both singing from the same so
ng sheet. In Betty Blue Eyes, a musical adaptation of Alan Bennett’s film A Private Function, the ‘Pig No Pig’ number suddenly switches the entire show into farcical misunderstanding mode when the aged mother-in-law thinks that she’s about to be killed and eaten, not Betty the pig.
In Legally Blonde, The Musical, the riotous no-holds-barred second act courtroom scene becomes a killer mini farce-within-a-musical, wittily choreographed around ‘There! Right There!’, an elaborate production number with the entire cast onstage asking of the witness for the prosecution: ‘Is he gay or European?’
There are other times, however, when grafting farce onto music or music onto farce is best avoided, especially when it results in a horrible hybrid like Popkiss, David Heneker and John Addison’s short-lived 1972 adaptation of the Ben Travers’ most celebrated farce, Rookery Nook. The songs were reasonably hummable but the farcical comedy that sparkles in the original play was rendered by them, as Frankie Howerd used to say, ‘titterless’.
7. Spent Farce?
‘One must shake an audience out of its expectations’
–Joe Orton
WHAT 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 lon
ger. 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?