May the Farce Be With You (6 page)

The Victorians certainly knew how to construct things to last, like Tower Bridge and the Royal Albert Hall. They also knew how to build rock-solid laughter machines, like
Slasher and Crasher
and
Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw
. It's just that we rarely get the chance to enjoy them. Until we do, whenever I watch reruns of
Only Fools and Horses
or
Hancock's Half Hour
, or catch up on a Ray Cooney farce, I'll think of John Maddison Morton and how he got there first.

‘
You do have to go through a quite rigorous hell in the rehearsal room' –
Celia Imrie

A
NY COMEDIAN WILL
tell you that dying is easy, comedy is hard. Any actor will tell you that farce is hard, easy to die in. If the audience laughs, a farce is funny; if they don't laugh, it isn't funny. Simple. Or is it more challenging than that? As stand-up comic turned playwright Richard (
One Man, Two Guvnors
) Bean pointed out in a radio interview, the real aim of farce is not to make the audience
laugh
: ‘the objective is to make them
helpless –
and that's an enormous challenge to set yourself.'

For actors performing in farce, that challenge is
ginormous
. Laughs don't just happen – they have to be earned. According to Brian Rix, there were 575 laughs in
Dry Rot
– roughly five a minute. Precisely how many made the Whitehall Theatre audience
helpless
in 1957, we'll never know.

But the art of raising giggles, guffaws, chuckles and belly laughs and bringing the manipulative farce-writer's
imaginary world to life involves far more than manic exits and entrances or verbal and physical dexterity. Delivering scatter-gun dialogue, wisecracks, door-slams, knockabout situations, outrageous puns, sexual overtones and Mr Bean-style pratfalls all have to be pieced together, bit by bit, in the rehearsal room.

Comedies of sexual desperation and mistaken beds depend on precision execution. Turning a cleverly plotted, carefully constructed script into a conduit for helpless laughter is a unique performance skill that can never be pitch-imperfect. Actors tell me there's even an art to slamming a door. It takes real expertise to drop your pants on cue.

Even experienced actors find it quite daunting making the transition from the original printed page to a live stage engulfed by a tsunami of laughter. According to Celia Imrie, discussing her role in the 2011 Old Vic revival of
Noises Off
, ‘You do have to go through a quite rigorous hell in the rehearsal room. It's kind of like doing a maths exam really, trying to remember where you come in and where you go out. But the dividends pay off when the audience is screaming with laughter. It's like an injection. Like being in a football team and scoring a goal and when you do it's heaven.'

David Haig, who I regard as one of the few contemporary actors who were born to play farce, told
The
Guardian'
s Mark Lawson how the sound of helpless hysteria has its dangers: ‘It is a great buzz. But you have to be careful. You can get very precious about where a particular laugh is and whether you get it. It's very bizarre, the way that very minute inflection or intonation can completely destroy a laugh. And you can get obsessed by that one laugh and not be aware that other parts of the play are becoming funnier.'

As Alan Ayckbourn has said: ‘Farce needs total expertise. Anyone who uses the phrase “just a farce” is very wrong. Everyone knows if a farce is working or not – are we laughing or are we not? If not, well you've blown it mate!'

Looking back to my own acting career, I confess I once blew it in a farce – big time!

Not Now Darling
became an international hit for Ray Cooney and John Chapman in 1968, with ace farceurs Bernard Cribbins and Donald Sinden heading the cast. By 1971 rep theatres across the UK were doing it too (‘Direct from London's West End'). I look back in embarrassment to the time when I was cast in the Bernard Cribbins role in a rep production at Worthing's Connaught Theatre – and died the proverbial death.

I had queued at the Strand Theatre to see the original West End production of
Not Now Darling
, a farcical tour de force in which Gilbert Bodley (Sinden), the
womanising director of an elegant fur salon, and his prim co-director Arnold Crouch (Cribbins), become uproariously embroiled in the consequences of Gilbert's attempted infidelity. The farce-rich cast, directed by Patrick Cargill, completely nailed a sex comedy that's ultra-slick, wickedly cynical and dripping with punch-lines, half-naked girls hiding in cocktail cabinets, verbal buffoonery and running gags, such as bits of lingerie thrown out of windows. The audience choked with mirth.

Rather like Helen Marsh, the ‘I Can Do That' woman in
The
Catherine Tate Show
, I thought I could do a Cribbins. Being cock-sure and young, I wasn't prepared to admit that I didn't possess much of Ayckbourn's ‘total expertise'. And maybe because we were all comparatively inexperienced actors at Worthing we simply assumed that we could choke the audience into laughing. In the end, we didn't nail the play, we hammered it so hard that nobody out front dared laugh. Well, maybe they smiled loudly, but only out of sympathy. In fact it was so bad on the opening night, even the ushers seemed poised to walk out.

What went wrong? During the first week of rehearsal the company committed the cardinal error of thinking everything was funny and falling about. But by the first night, all those knife-edge situations and running gags
that we had worked on and that I knew had produced massive explosions of laughter in the West End were played out in a kind of respectful silence. When that happens onstage you panic internally, but externally you try to carry on regardless, which in itself becomes farcical. I mean, have you ever seen
Noises Off
?

It felt as if we were in a comedy of terrors. We knew our lines. We performed the play word perfect. But we didn't have the technical skills, or the balls I guess, to bounce the comedy without rib-nudging the audience. Maybe we assumed that farce simply involved actors running in and out, dropping their trousers or knickers and slamming a few doors. Perhaps the characters were too overdone – or underdone – to appear truthful. Our comedy timing probably went awry. Some of us thought our director wasn't geared up enough.

My own theory is that we simply didn't know what we were doing and ended up underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Decades later, I still get flashbacks to that most farcical of performances. I've had nothing but total respect for that rare breed of actors – and directors of course – who are able to make a go of farce ever since.

Everybody says that the successful presentation of a farce requires lots of hard graft. But what does the graft entail? Drama schools may well teach farce, but
young actors rarely ever see a farce performed, never mind have an opportunity to act in one. Acting in farce demands a level of commitment and experience that is almost impossible to come by these days. Academic theories of farce abound, but you won't find an Idiot's Guide to performing farce.

Even so, taking my cue from Richard Bean, here are my own thoughts for actors on making an audience fall about
helplessly –
a sort of ‘Seven Pillars of Norman Wisdom'.

 

1.   Never think you are funny. Never try to be funny. Never nudge the audience. Keep a straight face, even when hilarious things are occurring all around you onstage. As Joe Orton once said, ‘farce requires complete seriousness of treatment by the actors and an emphasis on action: there are few memorable
lines
in Feydeau or Travers'. Orton claimed to be a great admirer of Ben Travers who, in a tribute to popular Aldwych farce actor Ralph Lynn, observed: ‘Nobody ever appreciated as well as Lynn how intensely serious is the job of being funny.' Ben Travers' own motto at the Aldwych was ‘never try to be funny.' Think Buster Keaton on the big screen.

2.   Be truthful. Characters, even comic clergymen and conniving bigamists, have to be true to be funny. It is essential for the actor to get inside the character, convince the audience, even if their truthfulness means they are slightly bonkers
and not quite real and even if the predicaments they are in are out of the ordinary. Think Basil Fawlty. Geraldine McEwan, who appeared in the original (disastrous) production of Orton's
Loot
, has described how the farce actor has to feel everything ‘much more passionately' than in a comedy, even if the characters are only skin deep: ‘Like a good caricature, which catches the essentials of personality but hasn't the complexity of a true portrait.' Think James Corden as Francis Henshall in
One Man, Two Guvnors
.

3.   Treasure teamwork. In farce, you can't have a selfish or a starry actor pulling attention at the wrong moment, especially when you are dealing with physical comedy, machine-gun dialogue, outrageous plot twists and complicated stage business. The team counts for everything in farce. Actors need each other more than in any other genre. The great British farceurs achieved their success through team-work, often writing for trusted actors they knew well. In the 1880s, Pinero's farces were performed by regulars at the Royal Court Theatre; a more or less permanent company performed Ben Travers' farces at the Aldwych in the 1920s, led by Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn and Robertson Hare; Brian Rix's spirited semi-permanent team at the Whitehall worked so well together that they created a style of their own. These days it would no doubt be called an acting ensemble. There are very few of them about.

4.   All the vital work is done in the rehearsal room, but the seriously funny work begins onstage when an acting team draws the audience in with them. Remember the devil is not in the gags but in the situation. Play the situation for all its mirth and the gags will fall into place. Don't walk over the laughs. Anticipate the small ripples and the big waves of laughter that arise every night but be prepared for audiences to react differently in each performance. Listen to the play. Listen to the laughs.

5.   Rewrites come with the territory. Classic farces are preserved in a kind of theatrical aspic. If they are to have any laughter value, brand-new farces need to evolve organically, often painfully. Joe Orton's
Loot
and
What the Butler Saw
under-went substantial changes before they became revered classics. Actors should be prepared to relearn pages of new dialogue or even an entire act and be ready to change physical stage business if it isn't getting the laughs.

6.   Physical dexterity is equal to the verbal agility required in farce. Actors need to be gym-fit to accomplish the physical consequences of the plot. To negotiate Feydeau's ludicrous entanglements, the actors go through a complete body workout. In a typical Ray Cooney or Brian Rix farce, the actors are required to cope with props and objects that take on a life of their own, being bundled in and out of rooms or cupboards, juggling with multiple entrances exits and, more
than likely, going through several character transformations – and all at a galloping pace.
It was this progression to wild physical virtuosity which so impressed theatre critic Benedict Nightingale when Rix played an innocent Parliamentary Under-Secretary to an unfaithful government Minister in Michael Pertwee's 1972 farce
Don't Just Lie There, Say Something
(the cast included a very young Joanna Lumley): ‘Tell one tiny lie, and, before you know it, the need for consistency has forced you to pass off your brother as an Australian millionaire, hide your wife and mistress in the cocktail cabinet, slip dope into a police-man's beer, and dress yourself up as a charwoman, probably forgetting to take off your false moustache in your panic.' Phew!

7.   Learn the art of timing: when to throw a line away; how to build several laughs on top of each other; how to hold up a scene to allow a big laugh to take its course; how to time an entrance or exit; how reactions generate laughter; how to carry on regardless when nobody laughs.

 

Is being seriously funny worth all the hard graft? Before he retired from the theatre in 1977, Brian Rix, one of the most successful farce actors that Britain has produced, told journalist Lynda Lee-Potter why it is: ‘I really do savour the pleasure of timing a line perfectly. It's rather like changing gear properly or playing a
good stroke at cricket, and of course there's the sexual element. It's like making love really well. It's a deeply physical feeling. But then laughter itself is deeply physical – it involves an explosion of energy that can hit you like a sledgehammer in the theatre. A responsive audience whips you so it hurts.'

‘
If you really want to make an audience laugh, it's the situation.' –
Stephen Sondheim

A
FUNNY THING HAPPENED
on the way home from the theatre. I tore up my Frankie Howerd fan club card. Reprising the role of the devious Roman slave Pseudolus in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
seemed a good idea at the time, but Frankie's performance turned out to be virtually titterless. For a devoted Frank-ophile, and also a devotee of a musical that is also one of the fastest, funniest farces ever to have been written, this was no laughing matter.

I first became aware of Frankie Howerd when he was the popular star of the BBC's
Variety Bandbox
(‘presenting the people of variety to a variety of people'), his trademark catchphrases such as ‘Not on your Nellie!' and ‘I was am
-aaaazed
!' spluttering out of the radio every fortnight. I joined the Howerd crowd decades before geeky university students wore tee shirts emblazoned with ‘Get Your Titters Out!'. But in 1986 a peculiar
thing happened. Frankie went to Chichester and I went off Frankie.

With the best years of his comedy career behind him, and playing too much on his leering Lurcio persona in
Up Pompeii!
, here was my all-time favourite stand-up starring in a revival of the musical in which he had triumphed in the 1960s, but instead of an evening of killer laughter and riotous vaudevillian naughtiness he practically murdered the role of ‘the lyingest, cheatingest, sloppiest slave in all Rome'.

Far from fit and approaching his seventies, with those lugubrious features described by critic Irving Wardle at the time as ‘resembling a half-melted waxen effigy of Edith Sitwell',Frankie gave us the sloppiest Pseudolus in all of Chichester. He was so jaded that he had to sit down for the big musical numbers and sometimes even wandered off the vast Chichester Festival Theatre stage altogether, apparently hoping the audience wouldn't notice. When the production transferred to the West End's Piccadilly Theatre, it lasted just 49 performances.

It was impossible not to feel a great wave of sympathy for an ageing comedian at a part of his life beset by professional setbacks, physical ailments and probably far too many large brandies. Old clowns are always sad figures. But I still wanted to give Frankie a kick up the farce.

What ultimately fascinated me about this dismal experience was how farcical comedy can only truly work its manic magic on the audience when the energy levels onstage are maintained at the correct kilowattage. With songs or without them, farce needs a straight face, clever timing, precision acting techniques and a well-orchestrated pace if the audience is to be carried along on its comedic journey into anarchy and then further and further on into the realms of hysteria.

With the energy onstage switched on at the right level,
A Funny Thing…
does all of these things – script, music and lyrics totally in tune with just about every aspect of farcicality. Get that mix wrong, and the farce switches off.

A Funny Thing…
is a throwback to the deepest roots of farce, combining the two thousand-year-old lowbrow comedies of the Roman playwright Plautus with the even lower-brow energy of vaudeville and variety, all jollied along by Stephen Sondheim's perfectly pitched songs. The result is a non-stop laugh-a-thon in which Pseudolus struggles to win the hand of a glamorous but dim-witted courtesan (Philia) for his young master (the equally dim-witted Hero), in exchange for his freedom.

In his biography
Laughing Matters
, co-writer Larry Gelbart describes how he, co-writer Burt Shevelove and Sondheim achieved the perfect music-comedy balance
only because they wrote, re-wrote, re-re-wrote, pulled apart and slotted back together, before eventually coming up with the final version. Sondheim too has explained how he resisted the temptation to force jokey rhymes into his lyrics, partly because of their lack of singability but mainly because they don't add to the overall humour of the show. ‘I learned from Burt Shevelove (particularly Burt, and also Oscar Hammerstein) that the idea is more important than the cleverness, and that, if you really want to make an audience laugh, it's the situation'.

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 song 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'.