May the Farce Be With You (3 page)

Travers'
Rookery Nook
and
Thark
, King's
See How They Run
, Frayn's
Noises Off
and the some of the well-known Pinero titles are often revived, along with that transgendered dowager from Brazil,
Charley's Aunt
, giving new audiences the chance to glimpse what British farce can do. But why has a work of theatrical genius like
One for the Pot
been ignored? Why overlook an anarchic gem like Pertwee's
She's Done It Again
? These plays, and many other still playable farces from the post-war era, have fallen out of favour. Yet, at the time, Harold Hobson described
She's Done It Again
as ‘the funniest in which Brian Rix has ever appeared' and praised its ‘delicious
and delirious' qualities: ‘What looks feeble and hackneyed on the page glows with glorious life in the Garrick Theatre.'

Involving an accident-prone parson, the Reverend Hubert Porter, who becomes embroiled in an increasingly bizarre world of sexual outrageousness and infidelity that leads to a succession of dotty deceptions and mad masquerades, Pertwee pushes a string of Establishment figures to the very brink of moral disaster, at times even echoing Orton's rather more self-consciously outrageous comic salvos against prevailing moral codes in
Loot
and
What the Butler Saw
.

‘The libidinous, nervous tax inspector; the Reverend Hubert Porter, terrified of being discovered in his contribution to the great quintuplets deception; the crooked hotel proprietor, nervous, too, because all his machinations go wrong; the dotty old professor Hogg delivering babies by grace and by God – all these characters, and more, in
She's Done It Again
, were threatened by the ultimate catastrophe,' Rix recalls in
Farce About Face
. Similarly, the taxi-driving bigamist in Cooney's much later
Run For Your Wife
(1983) is made to face total disaster once his carefully organised web of deception begins to go cock-eyed and the police start snooping around.

Rix's achievement, apart from dropping his trousers onstage more than any other British actor, like so much
good popular theatre, has been virtually forgotten and is rarely included in the familiar narrative that says British theatre in the Fifties and Sixties was all about the English Stage Company, John Osborne, Joan Littlewood and Harold Pinter, with young Mr Orton winking from theatre's naughty step. If there is any critical credit, it is often given with a nod of sage-like condescension. For instance, in his study of 1960s drama, Laurence Kitchen typically claimed that Whitehall-type fare catered for a ‘less sophisticated' public. ‘These farces are the pop art of canteens and seaside piers.'

No wonder the exceptionally skilled farce writers and actors who emerged from the Whitehall team have never been given their due amongst the post-war new wave of up-and-coming comedy performers and writers such as Frankie Howerd, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Frank Muir and Dennis Norden, and Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

‘For some maddening reason our critical friends will always try and find favour with the French variety of farce rather than the English variety,' observed Rix. ‘Yet I'll bet we've had a greater number of successes this century than any of your ooh-la-la lot put together. John Chapman, Ray Cooney, Michael Pertwee and Philip King have provided more laughs for more people
in the theatre than probably any other bunch of writers in history.'

Cooney is still creating, or revisiting, his cock-eyed characters embroiled in cock-eyed situations. But in theatres where the laughter of farce once hit the rafters – and kept the box offices happy too – you are more likely to hear the sound of musicals.

Still, whenever I look at that black and white photo of a distant crowd laughing at Rix's Whitehall team going full pelt, I like to think of that golden age of British farce and those marvelous comedies that have mostly been consigned to the wheelie bin of theatre history. Inevitably I get a nagging feeling that without those plays, and without the kind of people who created them and laughed at them, our current theatre is missing something rather special.

‘
To be in a theatre full of people laughing at what you have taken great pains to create is a fantastic feeling.'

W
ITH A CAREER
in the theatre spanning more than 65 years, Ray Cooney is Britain's world-class farceur. Who else has spent a lifetime finding ever-ingenious ways to celebrate the farcical foibles of human nature. By my reckoning, he has written, directed, produced and appeared in more stage farces than anyone currently living on the planet. Starting out as a boy actor in 1946, he served an acting apprenticeship playing with various repertory companies before joining the Brian Rix company of farceurs at the Whitehall Theatre in 1956, where he appeared in
Dry Rot
and
Simple Spymen
. It was during this period that his talent for creating laughter first emerged.

As a fan of farce, over the decades I have seen almost all of Ray Cooney's West End productions, and many of those revived in provincial repertory theatres or on tour, from the insanely inventive
One for the Pot
(co-written with Tony Hilton) and the sexually provocative
Not Now Darling
, to
There Goes the Bride
,
Move Over Mrs Markham
(written with John Chapman),
Chase Me, Comrade!
,
Wife Begins at Forty
,
Why Not Stay for Breakfast?
,
Run For Your Wife
, 
Two into One
,
Out of Order
,
It Runs in the Family
,
Funny Money
, 
Caught in the Net 
and its sequel,
Tom, Dick and Harry
.

We sat down and talked about a life spent in the hectic world of headlong humour at the calm-as-a-cucumber Cooney residence in Essex, where his artist wife Linda provided chunky cheese and pickle sandwiches and lashings of hot coffee while I fiddled on the sofa with my recording device.

Funnily enough, I was slightly in awe of meeting someone who has given me so many hours of laughter in the theatre. After all, it was those hilarious Cooney farces at the Whitehall that had such a big influence on my development of a sense of humour in my teens. I've long believed that what Ray Cooney doesn't know about farce is nobody's business, so I nodded sagely as the man the French have described as ‘The English Feydeau' fielded my questions in his typically good-humoured, self-effacing manner.

As we talked, I found it hard to believe that Ray Cooney is still keeping the farce flag flying in his eighties. His latest directing project is a film version of his most successful farce,
Run For
Your Wife
, starring
Danny Dyer, Neil Morrissey, Denise Van Outen and Kellie Shirley.

Of all the great twentieth-century farceurs, Ray Cooney is the last still standing.

Some of my earlier plays were made into movies but they were 95 per cent the play with some location work inserted – basically, the stage play on screen. You couldn't get away with that today. If you're trying to make a genuine movie you need to ‘open it up' as they say, although I like to quote the film version of
There's a Girl in My Soup
as an example of opening up a successful stage comedy so much that they kind of lost the thread. Stage farces are generally claustrophobic, so in opening them up you have to be very careful.

Fortunately
Run For Your Wife
was the only play I have written with two sets in one – the home of each wife. John Smith, the bigamist cabbie, spends his time rushing from one to the other, so in a way the plot was already opened up for me and I simply had to fill in the period when he was travelling from one place to the other and get him into various scrapes on the way.
I kept the original story just the same and introduced one other character, but the big change is that the film is set today, not in the 1980s, so obviously you have to introduce things like mobile phones and update some of the language. As for the basic premise that roots the comedy in reality, well, bigamy remains a criminal offence, fortunately for me, though not for a liar like John Smith or his innocent wives!

All I ever wanted to be was an actor. I never knew why. My mum and dad scrimped and saved to send me to a rather good school, Alleyn's, but I kept saying it's no good getting me marvellously educated because I want to leave as soon as possible and get into the theatre. I think they thought I would grow out of it. But when I reached fourteen we sat down with the headmaster and came to a deal whereby if I could find a theatre job during the summer holiday they would let me go. I don't think anyone ever believed I would get very far. Undaunted, I walked round all the West End agents and finally got an audition for
Song of Norway
at the Palace Theatre – and that was it.

As an aspiring actor I didn't especially want to do comedy. I thought I would be the next Laurence Olivier. I was always aware of popular comedy. My parents loved variety and couldn't afford a babysitter so they took me along with them to places like the Brixton Empire and we'd go and see great comedians like Max Miller, Sid Field and the Crazy Gang. I was into Abbott and Costello then, and the Bob Hope ‘Road' films too, but it was in the variety theatres where I first became aware of the power of laughter and being in an environment where you could get carried away by it.

Not at all. Dad was a carpenter who had a very jokey personality. Mother worked too, but from the age of sixteen she became a paraplegic after an injury at work. On her first day there she went to sit down and a young office boy played a prank by pulling her chair away. She spent over a year in hospital. For the rest of her life she walked with a stick or was in a wheelchair. She was a fantastic person, very supportive of me.

Not until I came out of the Army, after my National Service, when I joined what I thought was going to be a weekly repertory company in Wales, only to find out on the day I arrived at a small village just outside Cardiff that it wasn't quite what I expected. Outside the village hall a poster advertised a list of popular plays, including
Jane Eyre
and
Smiling Through
and the Philip King farce
See How They Run
. What I thought was a six-week season was in fact a different play every night. Without realising it, I had joined the last of the touring fit-up companies. You learned two plays in the first week and by the time I had finished I had a basic repertoire of 40 plays – everything from broad comedies to serious tragedy. People came from miles around to see ‘the drama'. I then joined the weekly rep manager Frank H. Fortescue's Famous Players company in Blackburn for 18 months, appearing in a different play every week.

Not really. When I did
See How They Run
in fit-up it had not long finished its first West End run. But you have to remember that in the early 1950s, to those of
us in our twenties, Ben Travers' plays seemed as if they were from another era. To me,
Rookery Nook
was old hat. Of course, I didn't have a clue then that much later on in my career I would get to know Ben and direct one of his plays.

Like every rep actor I wanted to get into the West End. While on a break from Blackburn I went with my parents to see
Reluctant Heroes
at the Whitehall. I thought it was so funny that I wrote to Brian telling him how I had a lot of experience and that I thought my comedy talents were quite something. He wrote back and said he was auditioning the next week for a try-out tour of a new farce by John Chapman called
Dry Rot
.

In the meantime I had landed a television job up north at Granada, so I pulled out of the play. The series should have run for twelve weeks but only did six, so I wrote back to Brian and said I'm still available. He rang my mother and asked ‘How old does your Raymond play?' She said: ‘How old do you want him to play?' Brian explained that it was a spivvy character, and she replied: ‘Oh Raymond can be spivvy as well!' And that's
how I got the role of Flash Harry on tour, the part played in the West End by Basil Lord.

Brian asked me to be in the next comedy by John Chapman,
Simple Spymen
, which opened in 1958 and ran for almost four years. During the run I thought I had better do something else during the day except chase girls and play tennis, so I suggested to another actor in the company, Tony Hilton, that we write something as a vehicle for Brian, who hadn't got his next play. We knew that Brian wanted to get away from the goonish North Country character he had become well known for. But on the other hand, we also knew that audiences liked him as that character. So we came up with the idea of having him play the lovable goon as one of identical triplets. In the end Brian played no less than four different characters in
Simple Spymen
, with the assistance of doubles of course. It was probably his most physically demanding farce.

Actually, I didn't give them any thought at all! I just sat down with Tony and we wrote. I guess I didn't realise how much I'd soaked up about comedy as an actor in fit-up and weekly rep. I'd been in plays by Ben Travers and Philip King but, to be honest, as a young actor you didn't really appreciate what went into the writing of them. With
One for the Pot
we quickly learned how to fine-tune the plot and make the complications of Brian's various characters popping on and off the stage work because we did three full try-outs of the piece – at Richmond, Birmingham and Wolverhampton. After each trial run we made huge rewrites to polish the comedy and get it absolutely right.

Yes, I very soon realised that try-outs with audiences are part of the structure of writing farce. With farces, you never get it right first time. After
One for the Pot
the kind of plays I write became very convoluted and almost thriller-like in their construction – in
Run For Your Wife
, a guy tells a lie, and that lie leads to another lie which spreads like a virus. With
Funny Money
, after
the first rehearsed play reading in front of an audience, the first act went so wonderfully well that I thought I had an instant hit on my hands. But during the second act I soon discovered that I had actually gone off on a wrong tack in the first act, which meant that nothing worked in the second. I went away and rewrote the entire second act before the next try-out tour went into rehearsals six weeks later. Luckily I hit upon something that did work!

Yes indeed, though I think a lot of it must have come to me naturally. By the time I joined Brian I had done over one hundred plays as an actor with the fit-up company and in weekly rep. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work in farce from being onstage with Brian and from Wallace Douglas, who directed most of the Whitehall farces. Basically, I think the Whitehall success was all about teamwork. I discovered that you really do need a team for broad farce, a group of actors who can work together in rehearsal and onstage in front of the audience, because playing farce is very much like a tennis match. You can't play tennis on your own, you have to ensure you hit the balls to each other properly and you have to do it with perfect timing. That's why
you can't have a star actor who thinks the focus is just on him or her. Actually, since Brian, I never wrote with any specific actor in mind.

I suppose that's because Brian assembled a team who had come from the same background as I had, mostly from rep – a breed of actor who knew how to connect with audiences and deal with building the laughs. Let me just say this about Brian Rix: nobody in the past or in the future has ever, or will ever, achieve what he did as an actor-manager at the Whitehall and later at the Garrick. He has never really been given the credit for it. Brian got his knighthood and baronetcy for his work for charity and with Mencap. But what he did for the theatre is totally unique. At the Whitehall he presented only five farces in about 21 years and he starred in each one. Those plays were sold out months in advance. He ran a wonderful ship. It was Brian who had the idea of doing TV excerpts from the Whitehall. Nobody had ever done that before. It will never be done again.

Actually I always thought of my plays as comedies with farcical overtones. A farce to me is a foolish thing, except that I like to think that at their heart is a serious premise. What I look for initially is the plot. What's the story? Is it rooted in real life? Is it believable enough to draw the audience in. In fact, most of my ideas for plays come from real life, from reading the papers. So I don't really look for a ‘funny' storyline at all; in fact I look for a potential tragedy.