May the Farce Be With You, Page 3

  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!

  Looking back on a life in comedy, where did it all begin for you?

  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.

  Were you already into comedy, even at that young age?

  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.

  Do you come from a theatrical family?

  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.

  So when did you first become aware that there was such a thing as a stage farce?

  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.

  You mention playing in See How They Run. At the time were you aware of other farces by writers such as Ben Travers, Pinero or Feydeau?

  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.

  The Brian Rix company at the Whitehall Theatre was the launchpad for your career. How did you first become involved?

  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.

  What led you into writing for the Whitehall company?

  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.

  For that first play, as you were honing your writing skills, did you ever work out how the great farceurs of the past constructed their comedies?

  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.

  So rewrites are an essential part of the creative process for you?

  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!

  Acting and writing as part of the Whitehall company must have been quite a learning experience.

  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 fr
ont 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.

  My own memory is that the Whitehall farces made stars of actors like Basil Lord, Leo Franklyn and Larry Noble. Whatever they got up to onstage, they always remained completely in character and yet they seemed to have a strong bond with the audience.

  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.

  How do you go about creating a farce?

  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.

  In Run For Your Wife the premise was very tragic – bigamy. Then I needed a bigamist and I needed wives, so I gave him a wife in Streatham and a wife in Wimbledon. Then I thought, what would be his ideal job? I came up with a taxi driver because it meant he could easily schedule sly trips from one home to another. Then I needed to add a threat to his layers of lies and deception, other than the two wives finding him out, so, as bigamy is a criminal offence, I brought in some policemen.

  I usually start the actual work by making a hell of a lot of notes on bits of paper which I then stuff into my pockets. When the bits of paper get to about half a ton in weight I think I’d better get on and write it up. It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. Although I left school very early, one of the subjects I was always very keen on was algebra, so I guess that’s why I’m quite adept at fitting all the bits together.

  So you are working out the comic potential as you build on the basic premise?

  Yes, but you won’t find many gags or direct jokes in my plays. People often say, ‘Oh come on Ray you must know a lot of jokes,’ but I don’t. Any gags come out of the situation, or at least I hope they do, unless you have a character who deliberately tries to be funny for some reason.

  Are you saying that the best farces are tragedies?

  Somebody once said that farce is real people in unreal situations and comedy is unreal people in a real situation. I’ll go along with that. Farce is difficult to dissect. You are twisting reality but you are not jumping out of reality. And, as I said, the reality of the initial premise may not be all that funny at all. A wife caught in a bigamous marriage, if she discovers it, is suffering the worse kind of betrayal. It’s not as though the husband’s simply having a fling with a girl at the office. He’s actually got another family home, another life, pets, children…for a woman to discover all of that after 20 years of marriage is no laughing matter. And Wife Begins at Forty deals with the serious issues of midlife crisis for women. So when I’m writing, I might be going down a potentially tragic avenue for a while but the actual comedic bit doesn’t usually arrive until I go upstairs to my room in the attic with my bits of paper and start working on the words, the characters and their peculiarities.

  As in One for the Pot, the peculiarities and the farcical complications that you eventually engineer certainly place heavy demands on the actors.

  That’s true. With Two into One, I’ll always remember Michael William saying after he had been rehearsing for about a week, ‘My god, the RSC should be brought down here and given a lesson. It’s killing me. It’s so complicated. I know someone is due to come through a door but I can’t follow the plot!’

  I guess in performance there is also the central issue of actors having to deal with the big laughs.

  In 1983, when Run For Your Wife first opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre, Richard Briers, who was playing John Smith, the taxi driver, called me in a panic. ‘What am I supposed to do Ray’, he said, ‘every time I go to open my mouth at this particular point in the play, they laugh some more. I can’t stop them!’ Can you imagine the packed Shaftesbury Theatre exploding with laughter and Richard having to control it while thinking about when to continue the action. Even experienced actors like Richard ask what they should do while the laughter keeps coming at them. I say you just have to continue ‘in the moment’. Sometimes that makes the audience laugh even more! It’s about handling the laughs and not being distracted by them.

  But what do say to those who regard farces simply as frivolous formulaic laughter machines?

  Well, the purpose of farce is to generate laughter – that’s all. For me the only formula is the story. I guess if some academic read all of my work they might come up with a theory or discover a theme running through the plays, but I have never sat down and attempted to fit a farce into a formula.

  Would you say there are any basic rules for acting in farce?

  As a director I always ask the actors to be real onstage but to be aware they are in a comedy. Of course they need a hell of a lot of energy and an ability to time the comedy. Also, in my plays the characters are speaking in ordinary everyday language – only very fast; there are no fancy monologues to hold on to, which means that you haven’t got time to enlarge on anything. And you have to deal with any given situation very quickly, which means having a split-second awareness. The audience doesn’t notice it, but the geography of the actors onstage is absolutely vital too. If you’ve got a funny line followed by an exit, it’s no good saying the line in the middle of the stage and then walking all the way to the door, so you have to devise ways and means of exiting that make an impact and build the laugh. It’s technical stuff, but it works.

  And of course the actors need a heck of a lot of energy to get through a performance.

  Yes, but laughter is energising in itself. Gales of laughter coming across the footlights is addictive in some way. It’s a wonderful feeling when you get that. It’s a pleasure to go to the theatre every evening. As a writer and director sitting at the back of the auditorium, to be in a theatre full of people laughing at what you have taken great pains to create is a fantastic feeling. It’s the same for the actors. It’s incredibly fulfilling when they hear those eruptions of laughter.

  Are there rules for directing farce?

  There probably are but I don’t follow them myself except for telling the actors to relate to each other onstage truthfully. Farce might be fun to watch, but creating fun is a serious business. Actors that work with me know that my own little shortcut for describing how to play farce is ‘eyebrows up’. I don’t know where I got it from, but it’s impossible to say an unpleasant line when you are ‘eyebrows up’. If you say, ‘I hate you, please get out of the house’ with your eyebrows up you can’t go wrong. There’s something intrinsically funny about ‘eyebrows up’. Which is probably why I have so many lines on my forehead. Try it!

  Do you prefer writing by yourself or with a partner as you did with John Chapman on Not Now Darling, There Goes the Bride and Move Over Mrs Markham?

  Most comedy writing partnerships are sitcom or gag writers. There aren’t too many who sit do
wn and write farces together. With John it was a wonderful partnership. In something like 40 years we never had a cross word. Our partnership began when I had an idea for a farce after reading a short newspaper article about a man in Norway taking a lady to court over a mink coat he had given her. I made lots of notes and had just started to plot it out when John phoned out of the blue. He was writing the Hugh and I television series, starring Hugh Lloyd and Terry Scott, and was up to his eyes in it with another seven episodes to go, so he asked me if I would like to help him out. I agreed to co-write with John but, in return, asked him to read my new mink coat script. He liked it, worked on it with me, and that’s how Not Now Darling was created.

  We used to sit opposite sides of a table and act out the dialogue, much as I do now when I am writing on my own – I still get totally lost in the world of the characters as I write. John and I wrote four plays together and the only reason we stopped was because he liked writing for television, so he segued down that path and I carried on in theatre.

  Sounds like it was a thoroughly enjoyable collaboration.

  Well, everything in my work and my life has been fun. I never get up in the morning without thinking how lucky I am to be doing what I do.