May the Farce Be With You (2 page)

Decades later, I discovered critic Eric Bentley's comment about the liberating experience of farce: ‘Shielded by delicious darkness and seated in warm security, we enjoy the privilege of being totally passive while onstage our most treasured unmentionable wishes are fulfilled by the most violently active human beings that ever sprang from the human imagination.' But the perfect description of farce's laughter effect is
by Michael Frayn. In his introduction to Volume One of his
Collected Plays
, Frayn sums up precisely how I felt when, as a young teenager, I went with a coach party to see
Simple Spymen
(also written by John Chapman) at the Whitehall Theatre, by then established as the home of British farce: ‘You begin to warm to what you're seeing; your warmth warms the people around you; their warmth warms you back; your corporate warmth warms the performers; you all warm to the performers' warmth.'

Worth thinking about next time you are compelled to text a cool LOL?

‘
I didn't know you could laugh in the theatre.
I thought it was like going to church.'

A
T FIRST GLANCE
it's just a black and white photograph of a theatre audience taken more than half a century ago. But look a little closer. Hilarity is written across the face of every single person. Mouths are gaping. Eyes are gleaming. Tears are flowing. Cheeks are glowing. Sides are splitting. Endorphins are rushing.
Nobody is physically rolling around in the aisles. Another click of the shutter might catch them doing just that.

This roaring crowd is perched somewhere up in the Circle at the Whitehall Theatre in the early 1950s, enjoying a farce written by a member of a bright new acting company, Colin Morris, entitled
Reluctant Heroes
, a comedy of military life as lived by a motley crew of National Service recruits.

The uncredited photo appears in
My Farce From My Elbow
, the first of two autobiographies written by actor-manager Brian Rix (now Baron Rix of Whitehall and President of the Royal Mencap Society), who, at the age of 23, produced
Reluctant Heroes
and starred in it too as gormless recruit Gregory. As well as capturing that precise moment in a theatre when an explosion of shared laughter is about to go ballistic, this snapshot has always fascinated me because it evokes the mostly ignored post-war world of popular West End theatre-going.

Sometimes, when I go to the Trafalgar Studios, the former Whitehall, I fancy I can still hear echoes of forgotten laughter. Who were these men and women wearing grey flannel suits, home-knitted cardigans and NHS glasses? I like to think of them as my kind of people, my parents' and grandparents' generation, the
often bad-mouthed coach party trade who would rather see broad farces and big-name revues starring the Crazy Gang than the voguish dramas of Christopher Fry, T.S. Eliot and Jean Anouilh playing at that time – or
anything
by Samuel Beckett. These folk wanted to get as far
away
from John Osborne's kitchen sink as possible.

When
Reluctant Heroes
opened on 12 September 1950 farce was a major force for fun in London's Theatreland – a shining example of escapist entertainment after six bleak years of war and another six grey years of austerity. At the Whitehall, laughs weren't on ration. They were providing an antidote to austerity. Rix and company had tuned in to a commonly shared peacetime mood of optimism. Audience, actors and writers were all facing the same way. They had all lived through the war against Hitler. Virtually every family in the country contained someone who was now a rookie National Service sailor, soldier or airman. When the Korean War broke out a few months earlier in June 1950, almost one hundred thousand British servicemen and women were sent to East Asia.

No wonder that the hearty laughter of
Reluctant Heroes
burst a hell of a lot of belly buttons: the barrack-room humour and authentic service lingo of grumbling soldiers chimed with the times. ‘It can be recommended with the utmost confidence as one of the most effective
tonics now available against depression caused by conflict abroad and strikes and high taxation at home' observed an unnamed
Morning Advertiser
critic. In its own way,
Reluctant Heroes
was as topical and as relevant as Osborne's
Look Back in Anger
six years later.

Elsewhere in London's not-so-glittering West End of 1950, farce was staple fare, rather like musicals are today. At the Strand Theatre, veteran farceurs Robertson Hare and Arthur Riscoe were renewing their 1948 stage partnership in Vernon Sylvaine's hilarious comedy
Will Any Gentleman?
, about a meek and mild chap given a split personality by a music hall hypnotist.
Traveller's Joy
, a farcical door-slamming romp by actor-playwright Arthur Macrae involving an unpaid hotel bill, a divorced couple and an illicit liaison, was doing a roaring trade at the Criterion.
The Dish Ran Away…
by Graham Fraser became a hit at the Vaudeville Theatre, after transferring from the Whitehall to make way for
Reluctant Heroes
. Arthur Wing Pinero's 1911 farce about religious hypocrisy,
Preserving Mr Panmure
, was successfully revived at the Arts Theatre before rapidly switching to the Aldwych Theatre.

The seemingly unstoppable run of
Reluctant Heroes
ended on 24 July 1954 (around about the same time that RADA graduates Joe Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell were fancying themselves as budding novelists),
but it continued to attract audiences with a UK tour, a film adaptation, and countless subsequent revivals by the network of rep companies up and down the country.

There should be a plaque outside the Whitehall Theatre. For sixteen years under Rix's reign the Whitehall was a national house of hilarity, breaking the Aldwych Theatre team's previous record of ten-and-a-half years of consecutive farces written by Ben Travers. Described by Harold Hobson in
The Times
as ‘The greatest master of farce in my theatre-going lifetime', Rix followed his first Whitehall comedy hit with a succession of original crowd-pulling Whitehall farces:
Dry Rot
by John Chapman;
One for the Pot
by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton;
Simple Spymen
by John Chapman;
Chase Me, Comrade!
by Ray Cooney. Then he took over the Garrick Theatre on and off for nine years and did the same with The Brian Rix Theatre of Laughter.

Forward-looking and fresh, Rix was, I believe, the greatest populariser of farce in the twentieth century. In a shrewd move, he persuaded BBC television to transmit the first act of
Reluctant Heroes
from the Whitehall in May 1952. The result was ‘staggering', he recalled in a
Guardian
article published in 2008. ‘Even though the play was in its third year there were queues at the box office for months and the BBC's own viewer research
reported that the transmission received the “phenomenal [appreciation] figure of 90 out of 100” and that “there is little to report save tremendous, unqualified enthusiasm”. West End managers now fell over themselves trying to get excerpts on the BBC, while a viewer wrote: “I didn't know you could laugh in the theatre. I thought it was like going to church”.'

Five months later Rix presented the first full-length farce live from the Whitehall Theatre – Philip King's
Postman's Knock
. It was such a success that the BBC invited him to produce five more farces each year. There were more than 80 live transmissions in the ‘Brian Rix Presents' series; the first was
Love in a Mist
by Kenneth Horne in January 1956; the last was
What the Doctor Ordered
by Lawrence Huntingdon and Vernon Sylvaine, broadcast on Whit Monday 1972.

Another early Sixties BBC television series of specially written 50-minute farces called
Dial Rix
attracted huge audiences of up to 21 million, with titles such as
Come Prancing
,
Between the Balance Sheets
and
What a Drag
by comedy writers such as Ray Cooney, John Chapman, Kenneth Horne, Tony Hilton and Christopher Bond.

As the star actor in the Whitehall and Garrick farces, Rix's characters invariably became embroiled in absurd, seemingly inescapable situations and were always caught at some hysterical highpoint in the play
dropping their trousers to reveal baggy boxers and a pale pair of legs wrapped in sock suspenders. But it is slovenly theatre history to replicate the idea that Rix was simply a serial trouser-dropper – that the farces he produced and appeared in provided unsophisticated fun while it lasted but ought not now to be taken seriously as comedic theatre.

The mostly youthful Whitehall team aimed to show ordinary post-war working class and middle class audiences a reflection of themselves. Pinero's intellectually respectable turn-of-the-century farces were passé. The silly-ass Travers farces of the Aldwych era had passed their laugh-by date.

Set in the lounge of a
Fawlty Towers
-esque country hotel John Chapman's
Dry Rot
(1954) was a five-star classic, playing for three and a half years at the Whitehall. The plot spins around a pair of flashy loud-suited bookies and their dim-witted sidekick who become embroiled in a horse-nobbling swindle. The comedy chimed with a time when bookie's runners and widely flouted laws against off-course betting were part of the racing scene. Secret rooms, sliding panels and mistaken identities abound in a comic canter that was voted in a 2002 National Theatre poll as one of the 100 best plays of the twentieth century.

Chapman, who went on to write TV sitcoms such as
Fresh Fields
and
The Liver Birds
(with Carla Lane), and the prolific writer-director-producer and all-round farceur Ray Cooney, are shining examples of how fresh new contemporary British farce could capture the affection of the theatregoing public. Yet too often popular stage comedy of this era is either pooh-poohd or completely overlooked.

Rix and his team not only attracted audiences year after year, but also ushered in a flourishing golden age of inventive British farce that linked to the farce conventions of the past but also connected to music hall, variety,
The Goon Show
and
ITMA
, climaxing at one glorious moment in 1983, when Michael Frayn's send-up of the genre,
Noises Off
, and Cooney's ultimate tour-de-farce,
Run For Your Wife
, both began long runs in the West End.

If I wind back to my own theatre-going experience of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties it's the farces that keep grinning back at me. Naturally, as a boy actor and a drama student, I queued up for the new National Theatre and became infected by the buzz of the Royal Court (where I appeared in Peter Gill's 1967 production of
The Soldier's Fortune
with Sheila Hancock and Arthur Lowe). You got caught up in the excitement of Royal Shakespeare Company seasons, and the buzz of Joan
Littlewood at Stratford East. Rock musicals, like
Hair
and
Godspell
, and the Anthony Newley
Stop the World – I Want to Get Off
phenomenon, were also must-sees.

But while my fellow acting students were enthusing over Peter Brook's
Marat/Sade
or pondering over the meaning of ‘Pinter-esque', I was the one with a secret passion for the popular laugh-out-loud Britcoms running in the West End and on tour, the farces that literally ran and ran, like Cooney's brilliantly constructed
Chase Me, Comrade!
, inspired by Rudolf Nureyev's defection to the West. I can still remember laughing helplessly at the surreal visual buffoonery of this piece, especially Brian Rix's eternal victim character morphing through a series of increasingly desperate disguises, including a naval officer, a leaping ballet dancer, a character who stretches to become a ten-foot giant, and a surreal talking tiger-skin rug.

The fake tiger sequence provided one of the most sublimely funny moments I have ever experienced in a theatre, one that also registered at the time with
New Statesman
theatre critic, Ronald Bryden: ‘As the animated pelt, a bellowing officer at its heels, scrambles off-stage in a whirlwind of slamming doors, the piece achieves that moment for which the cast, with fingers crossed, nightly hold back: the “take-off”, the hysterical consummation when the actors and audience, throwing
off restraint and calculation, mutually surrender to the mingled idiocy and ingenuity which is the specific pleasure of farce.'

Once, after an intense morning's rehearsal of
The Soldier's Fortune
at the Royal Court, I sloped off to Shaftesbury Avenue to recharge my humour batteries at a matinee of Terence Frisby's
There's a Girl in My Soup
, by then in its third year in the West End. Maybe it was a yearning for more of that ‘mingled idiocy and ingenuity' that drew me there, even it felt like I was embarking on secret laughter-smuggling mission across the Berlin Wall. Coach party farces and anything by Terence Rattigan were just not sexy enough for Sixties swingers. I mean, who in their right mind would plump for the innocent innuendo of
No Sex Please, We're British
, Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott's hilarious long-runner of the bedroom variety, about a newly-wed couple ordering Scandinavian pornography by mistake, when you could snigger with the in-crowd at the fleshed-out single entendres of
Oh! Calcutta!

No Sex Please, We're British
played in the West End for fourteen years.
Chase Me, Comrade!
ran from 15 July 1964 to 21 May 1966 and was the last of the Whitehall farces. Rix then attempted to run a repertoire of comedies and farces at the Garrick Theatre with members of the old Whitehall team, including ace farce director
Wallace Douglas, and featuring comedians such as Leslie Crowther and Dickie Henderson.

The concept floundered financially, so Rix reverted to the tried and tested Whitehall format of presenting (and starring in) single plays for long runs, a strategy that produced some truly fine British farces. Three of them, written by Michael Pertwee –
She's Done It Again
(1969),
Don't Just Lie There, Say Something
(1971), and
A Bit Between the Teeth
(1984) – are funny, clever and inventive plays that easily measure up to anything in the Whitehall output. Yet in decades of theatre-going, I have yet to see any of these plays, or indeed any of the Whitehall farces, given the full professional West End or National Theatre treatment they deserve.