London Assurance needs funny actors sufficiently at ease in its ludicrous universe to take it seriously, though Fiona started by taking it too seriously, as she’d been so long in the world of Euripides, Ibsen and Beckett. Lady Gay Spanker stands up to analysis less fruitfully than Medea. “Honestly, if you just go for it, it will be fine,” we all said. Once she did, she enjoyed herself as much as we did watching her.
The play’s own author advertised its literary shortcomings. More to the point, a lot of its humour is as obscure as Ben Jonson’s, so I put a yellow marker pen over every line I thought should be funnier and handed it to Richard Bean. Half the biggest laughs were his. He preferred an almost unnoticeable credit just above the production photographer, so Boucicault got the plaudits, which would have suited him as much as our pragmatic determination to make a hit of his old play by improving it.
The director’s job on a show like London Assurance is to create a stage world where it can follow its own crazy logic, and cast it with actors who can play it without pushing it. The best directors of comedy and the best comic actors can push too hard on their bad days; even on their good days, they push too hard for somebody. As the rest of the audience rolls in the aisles, who hasn’t sat alone and sullen, seething at how unfunny a play is and how grotesquely it’s overplayed? So you try to establish where the top is, and urge the actors not to go over it.
Simon’s first entrance as Sir Harcourt, to the sound of Tibetan bells, in a huge brocaded dressing gown and plump in dyed-brown kiss curls, pitched the base camp quite close to the summit. Half an hour later, Fiona made her first entrance as Lady Gay, beside herself with the thrill of the chase, invisible hounds baying at her feet, and climbed closer to it, only to find Richard Briers already there as her ancient husband, Mr. Adolphus Spanker. There was plenty that an aspiring comic actor could have learned from Simon’s vowels, as full as his waist; from the affected precision of his diction; from the imperceptible lift he gave his best lines. She could have learned from Fiona’s “pell-mell, helter-skelter” speed of thought, her unabashed brio: “Horse, man, hound, earth, heaven. All, all, one piece of glowing ecstasy.” But whatever it was that brought the house down when Richard Briers wobbled unsteadily onto the stage cannot be taught.
The summer of 2011 looked particularly grim: Chekhov, Ibsen, Jacobean tragedy, the Ipswich serial killer. “No balance here,” I said to the planning meeting. I’d just done Hamlet, so nobody saw why it shouldn’t be my turn to deliver the laughs. I pretended to groan under the intolerable burden of giving people a good time. “It’s time James Corden came back to the theatre,” I said. “Does anybody have any ideas for him?”
During The History Boys, James showed me the scripts for a sitcom he’d written with his friend Ruth Jones, called Gavin and Stacey. It was quickly picked up by the BBC, adored by the viewers, and catapulted James onto the front pages as National Treasure. He went to a few parties, had a few drinks, and appeared in a bad movie. This was more than enough for the tabloids to turn on him. The Guardian devoted a full page to a solemn analysis of “one of the steepest and quickest falls from grace in showbiz history.”
Sebastian Born, head of the Literary Department, suggested an eighteenth-century Venetian comedy by Carlo Goldoni, The Servant of Two Masters. I knew it well enough to feel my lip curling. I played the title role at school, dressed in the full chequered harlequin gear, in a production reverent of the conventions of commedia dell’arte, and insistent on the physical dexterity of the harlequin. I managed no more than a couple of cautious somersaults, and I didn’t remember the play, or me, being very funny. Still, it was a classic of the Italian repertoire and it had a theoretically funny title role, so I uncurled my lip.
As I read The Servant of Two Masters for the first time since school, I thought: the farcical mechanics of this play are good, the central part’s OK, the dialogue’s lame, I’m not interested in re-creating the world of commedia dell’arte, I don’t want to dress James as a harlequin, but there must be some way of doing it that would play to James’s strengths. What, I wondered, was the English low-comedy equivalent of Italian low comedy? It could have a whiff of end-of-the-pier farce, and the Carry On films, and Ealing comedy. Goldoni has his two masters escape to Venice from Turin, because Venice has hotels where you can hide from the law and hole up for a dirty weekend. Maybe that’s Brighton, in the 1950s or ’60s. And it could have elements of the kind of variety show I used to see at the Manchester Palace Theatre in the 1960s, with Ken Dodd, Arthur Askey, or Morecambe and Wise.
I often direct a play because I have a hunch I’ll discover it as I go along. This time, with my back against a wall, needing a comedy, I thought I had a big idea.
The idea itself wasn’t funny: it was just an idea. I called Richard Bean, with the play, the idea, and James. He wasn’t at first wild about any of them, but he said he’d give it a go.
Then I called James. “I have this play, it’s an old Italian comedy—”
“Yes,” he said.
“You don’t want me to tell you what it’s about?”
“I’m in,” said James.
By now I had my shtick ready about the common roots of all the great European comic traditions, Plautus, music hall, Max Miller, slapstick, panto. None of it added up to funny. I can cast it, I thought; I can ask Mark Thompson to design an end-of-the-pier pastiche; but I can’t do the physical stuff, I can’t even turn a proper somersault. So I called Cal McCrystal, who made shows for Spymonkey, a company that traded in exactly the kind of controlled physical anarchy that I couldn’t create by myself.
In The Servant of Two Masters, Beatrice flees to Venice from Turin disguised as her brother Federigo, who has been killed by her lover Florindo. Beatrice’s servant, Truffaldino, loiters hungrily outside the inn where she’s staying, when Florindo arrives and offers him a job. Truffaldino accepts it, and spends the rest of the play trying to keep his two masters apart.
FLORINDO: What’s this inn like?
TRUFFALDINO: Very decent, sir. Comfortable beds, good mirrors, excellent food. The smell from the kitchen makes my heart lift.
FLORINDO: And what do you do for a living, my good man?
TRUFFALDINO: I’m a servant, sir.
Richard Bean’s first draft arrived not long after he reluctantly agreed to have a go. Rachel Crabbe flees to Brighton from London disguised as her psychotic twin brother Roscoe, who has been killed by her posh boyfriend Stanley Stubbers in a gangland brawl. Her minder, failed washboard player Francis Henshall, is hanging hungrily outside the Cricketer’s Arms, where she’s staying, when Stanley arrives with an enormous trunk.
STANLEY: What’s this pub like?
FRANCIS: Groundbreaking. It does food.
STANLEY: A pub? That does food? Buzz-wam! Whoever thought of that? Wrap his nuts in bacon and send him to the nurse! What are the rooms like?
FRANCIS: World class.
STANLEY: Not that I care. I’m boarding-school trained. I’m happy if I’ve got a bed, a chair, and no one pissing on my face.
I know how to do this kind of crazy, I thought. Find the right toff, put him in a rehearsal room with James, and make sure they don’t go over the top. Meanwhile, the toff offers Francis a second job, and he takes it:
FRANCIS (Aside): I’ve got two jobs, how did that happen? You got to concentrate ain’t ya, with two jobs. Kaw! I can do it, long as I don’t get confused. But I get confused easily. I don’t get confused that easily. Yes I do. I’m my own worst enemy. Stop being negative. I’m not being negative, I’m being realistic. I’ll screw it up. I always do. Who screws it up? You, you’re the role model for village idiots everywhere. Me?! You’re nothing without me. You’re the cock-up! Don’t call me a cock-up, you cock-up! (He slaps himself.) You slapped me!? Yeah I did. And I’m glad I did. (He punches himself back.) That hurt. Good. You started it. (A fight breaks out, where he ends up on the floor, and going over tables.)
No problem here either. Cal McCrystal will show Jame
s how to pick a fight with himself and beat himself up.
Richard had given his version a title by the time rehearsals started: One Man, Two Guvnors. The next six weeks brought to mind what the Victorian actor Edmund Kean said on his deathbed when somebody asked him how he was feeling: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” As you work your way through Hamlet you take endless pleasure in the discoveries you think you’re making about the human condition. As you work through a farce, a company of funny actors will be funny the first time they read through a funny scene. It’s less funny second time through, and third time it’s torture. A lot of the rehearsal process is a fevered attempt to rediscover what made it funny in the first place. The possibility that the audience won’t laugh looms larger and larger. If they don’t laugh, you can’t accuse them of failing to see the play’s higher purpose. If it’s only there to make them laugh, and they don’t, it’s a stinker.
“You’ve written too many words. It’s like Ibsen,” said Cal to Richard after the first read-through.
“Are you sure about him?” Richard asked me.
Cal is a precision engineer. He arranged James’s fight with himself with scrupulous exactitude. Richard likes anyone who knows what he’s doing, so relations improved.
Among Richard’s additions to Goldoni was a skeletal eighty-seven-year-old waiter with the shakes, who helps Francis serve soup at the Cricketer’s Arms in the big set-piece scene where he serves dinner to both guvnors simultaneously. The guvnors occupy private rooms on either side of the stage, neither of them aware of the other’s existence. Alfie the waiter delivers food to Francis, who delivers it to the guvnors.
“Can we imagine it’s at the top of the pub? Can you put a stairwell in the middle and can they all enter from below?” I asked Mark Thompson. “We can keep pushing the eighty-seven-year-old waiter downstairs. That’s funny.”
Cal spent hours working out with Tom Edden, the hilarious young actor playing cadaverous Alfie, how to fall backwards downstairs and bounce back like a rubber ball, while I negotiated with Oliver Chris, another hilarious young actor, who played posh Stanley Stubbers. Oli and I disagreed where the top was, so I thought he went over it a little too often.
“But we had fun, didn’t we?” I asked him over dinner, a couple of years later.
“Except when you told me I was guilty of literally the most disgraceful piece of acting you’d ever seen in your life,” said Oli.
“Did I really say that?”
“Yup, and I didn’t do it again. Though it would have got a laugh.”
“But I get an enormous laugh by it, Mr. Gilbert,” said George Grossmith, the original Koko in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, about some vulgar piece of business or other.
“So you would if you sat on a pork pie,” said Gilbert, and vetoed the business.
“Stop laughing! Nobody’s allowed to laugh anymore!” I cried one day at the loyal gang of understudies who sat in the corner of the rehearsal room, laughing indiscriminately. “I’m the arbiter of funny! I get to decide!”
“Reliance on actors’ laughter is the furthest reach of self-deceit,” wrote Moss Hart in his wonderful Broadway memoir, Act One. Somebody must draw the line, to balance tight control and loose spontaneity. Somebody has to throw out the rancid pork pies.
The composer Grant Olding put together a four-piece skiffle band, called it the Craze, and wrote a series of hit songs to hustle the show along. “Some of them could be funnier,” I said to Grant. “Let’s see what we can find online.” Lying in wait on YouTube were the novelty acts that peppered the variety shows and pantos of my childhood: xylophone players, idiots playing car horns, accordionists and steel drummers. We filched everything that caught our eye: daylight robbery sustains many directorial careers. Before long, everyone in the cast had a novelty act except Daniel Rigby, who played Alan Dangle, Roscoe’s girlfriend’s boyfriend. “Do you want a novelty act? What can you do? Could you open your shirt and do a percussion solo on your chest?” Danny is effortlessly funny. He played his chest like he was Buddy Rich.
A few days before we opened, we invited fifty schoolkids into the rehearsal room to watch a run-through. They were particularly partial to Jemima Rooper as Rachel aka Roscoe Crabbe, “that tiny, weird-looking, vicious, short-arsed runt of a criminal.” They loved Suzie Toase as Dolly, the woman of Francis’s dreams: “He’s like a big kid. I’ve always liked that in a man, immaturity.” They roared at Tom Edden as the antique Alfie. The laughs for Oli were dangerously enthusiastic, but he stayed the right side of the top and sat on no pies. And, of course, they enjoyed James, who played them like a master and was as physically nimble as a gymnast. But the show didn’t take off. “Maybe they’re confused by you,” I said to James. “They know who you are, they know how clever you are. Francis is a simpleton.”
James was ahead of me. “I was like a smart-arse stand-up. I can fix it.”
A couple of days later, another fifty kids arrived for another run-through. James staked out his territory from the start: hapless, bewildered, hungry, stupid. But not guileless: three hundred years on, he rediscovered the native cunning of the harlequin, though the delirious schoolkids couldn’t have cared less about that.
The first preview was almost as heady as The History Boys, but everybody had to hold their nerve through the first five minutes. One of the director’s jobs is to let the audience know as quickly as possible what kind of show they’ve come to see. They got the hang of it almost as soon as the curtain went up: end-of-the-pier farce, Carry On film, low comedy. So why, they wondered, are we watching this old rubbish at the National Theatre? The ice started to thaw when Danny Rigby told them why he loved his girlfriend: “She is pure, innocent, unspoiled by education, like a new bucket.” And when James came on as Roscoe’s minder, stole a peanut, threw it in the air, and tumbled backwards over an armchair to catch it in his mouth, they surrendered. It was the kind of old rubbish they secretly liked better than Ibsen. By the time James asked for volunteers to come up and help him carry Stanley’s trunk into the Cricketer’s Arms, he’d led them into a seaside-postcard Arcadia.
War Horse and Curious Incident were triumphs of a collective vision. One Man, Two Guvnors had the funniest script I’ve ever been given, so the triumph was above all Richard Bean’s, with substantial supplementary ad libs by James. And I couldn’t have directed it without Cal, nor would it have lifted off without innately funny actors, who never lost their balance on the comic tightrope that stretches between control and chaos.
But comedy is hard. “Has anyone any idea what it’s like to be THE FIFTH FUNNIEST ACTOR in One Man, Two Guvnors?” one of them used to shout in the wings.
“This will be a very different crowd to the London crowd,” I said to James during rehearsals for the Broadway run. “When you bring the volunteers up to carry the trunk, you must not touch them.” James had an unerring instinct for selecting from the front two rows the two men most likely to give him what he needed to set the rest of the audience alight. In London, he used to pat their bottoms as they carried the trunk offstage, which lit up the audience some more.
“Don’t go anywhere near their bottoms,” I told James sternly. “Americans are a very litigious people. They’ll sue you.”
“Of course,” said James, “I won’t go near their bottoms.”
At the packed public dress rehearsal, he brought up two sweet-looking young men, and when he asked them to tell the audience what they did, they said they were in The Book of Mormon, the famous hit musical.
“Oh my God, have you any tips? This is all completely new to me,” said an apparently awestruck James, the opening shot in his campaign to conquer first Broadway and then the whole of American show business. As the Mormons carried off the trunk, he squeezed their bottoms like they were his gay best friends. The boys were thrilled, and so was the house.
“Sorry,” said James afterwards.
“Forget everything I told you,” I said.
A few days later, when he ask
ed for help with the trunk, he spotted a man in a big blond wig, who seemed very eager to be selected. James brought him up.
“What’s your name, sir?” he asked him.
“Donald,” said the man, whose wig may have been a combover. The audience jeered: Donald didn’t have many fans on Broadway.
“And what do you do?”
“I’m in real estate, and I’m the host of TV’s The Apprentice,” said Donald, swelling with needy self-delight. James patted his bottom as he carried the trunk into the Cricketer’s Arms. The Broadway audience laughed indulgently: they thought Donald was a joke, entirely inconsequential.
These days I watch James on YouTube, and catch up with him when he’s in London. I tell him he must come back to the theatre before too long, and I think he will, because he’s a creature of the stage. And when he sings in the car with Stevie Wonder, or Adele, or Michelle Obama, he’s the same gleeful seraph who beat himself up for being the role model for village idiots everywhere, the singular talent who brought a thousand people a night to an uproar of comic ecstasy, giving them what they best like.
12
One Night Only
PACKING THEM IN
Early in The Madness of George III, the king has his weekly audience with the prime minister.
KING: Married yet, Mr. Pitt, what, what?
PITT: No, sir.
KING: Got your eye on anybody, hey?
PITT: No, sir.
KING: More to the point—anybody got their eye on you, hey hey?
PITT: Not to my knowledge, sir.
One night in New York, after a run of two years in London, Julian Wadham’s mind was elsewhere, as must have been William Pitt’s during his many routine interviews with the king.
“Married yet, Mr. Pitt, what, what?” said Nigel Hawthorne as the king.
“Yes, sir,” said Julian, superb in his frosty hauteur.
Nigel’s eyes narrowed.
Balancing Acts Page 28