May the Farce Be With You (4 page)

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.

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.

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.

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!'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Most comedy writing partnerships are sitcom or gag writers. There aren't too many who sit down 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.

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.

When I first started writing we were always aware of the Lord Chamberlain's blue pencil. You were only allowed one ‘bloody' in a play. You just took censorship for granted and, let's be honest,
One for the Pot
and
Chase Me, Comrade!
are both very unsexy – although we made up for that with
Not Now Darling
in which
sex is talked about a lot – and by the time we get to
Two into One
you do actually see them in bed together. In a funny way, although it has now eased up for writers and there are no limits, it has somehow made a lot of comedy very offensive – anything goes these days.

I'd agree that it has become much more difficult to hit upon a basic premise. Even so, the dubious morality of the powerful and of politicians has always been good for farce and probably always will be. And getting married is still the basic thread of everything that happens outside of our working existence and family and friends. Alan Ayckbourn is still very clever at taking hold of domestic scenes and spinning them out.

The comedy writing focus has gone towards television. That's where the talent is now. It is very difficult for the kids who are starting out to forward their careers solely in the theatre. And it's probably much easier to revive classic farces from the past than to sit down and write something completely fresh and original. Most
of the farceurs of my generation were also actors who learned to write farces by appearing in them. It's not possible to serve that kind of apprenticeship any more. Perhaps our only hope is that some young director will get a hold of the classic farces or discover and produce some of the rarely performed ones, and maybe a young writer somewhere will see how genuinely funny they still are and that will spark them into trying to do the same and come up with something new.

Perhaps the danger is that directors and actors start putting farcical comedy in italics. I remember seeing a production of
London Assurance
at the National Theatre a few years ago. The director's approach was to get the actors to step outside of the play and give the audience a wink. You couldn't get involved in it. They wanted to say: ‘this is the style', which meant you didn't really care about the characters or the predicaments they were in. Mind you, it didn't seem to worry two-thirds of the audience who were quite happy to laugh at the nudges and the winks and the asides.

Of course you can have a character addressing the audience. But you have to find a way of setting it up. In
Not Now Darling
, Gilbert Bodley has asides that begin
when he opens what you think is a just a door, only to reveal a well-stocked cocktail cabinet. He looks at the audience and says: ‘No office should be without one,' which establishes that he can make remarks to the audience, now and again but not all the time. It would be a pity to take
One For Your Wife
and have John Smith nudging the audience. It would get plenty of easy laughs but I wouldn't accept it. It's cheapening. Oh well, maybe they'll be sending up my plays in the future!

Why men? I haven't the faintest idea! Except that it's a very male-dominated existence we all still live in. But in
Move Over Mrs Markham
it is the two ladies who cook up the plot and in
Wife Begins at Forty
the play is kicked off by Linda, the suburban housewife, when she begins to question her seventeen years of marriage. In the film of
Run For Your Wife
I actually think I improved the roles of the two wives.

I am not really academically driven or theory driven. I never attended any writing or directing classes. I never went to drama school. Comedy came my way and I just assimilated things as I went along. Had I gone on to university I would have written very different plays. All I know is that we are the only animal that has the ability to laugh, even under terrible circumstance. I'm sure that even in the horror of the Holocaust, in those dreadful concentration camps, some prisoners laughed.

I had a letter once from a woman who had been to see
Run For Your Wife
who said that as soon as she realised the play was about a bigamist she wanted to jump up and run out of the auditorium because she had been caught up in a horrendous bigamous marriage herself. She said she wasn't able to escape because she was hemmed in on either side of her seat, but in the end she was so pleased that she'd been forced to stay as she ended up laughing as much as everyone around her.

I look at
Loot
and
Entertaining Mr Sloane
and in a way they aren't believable – it's as if Joe didn't really mean it. I think my own comedies are real, with a silly twist to them, whereas with Orton it was always on
another darker plane. Very funny, but as if everything is being said in italics.

It certainly was a wonderful period for farce, right the way through to the 1980s. But I suppose fashions come and go. Farce won't die. Somebody will come along at some time or another and get us all rolling in the aisles again. You only have to see some of the productions in the little off-West End theatres to know that the acting and directing talent is out there. Those are the people who I am sure will one day find farce and reinvigorate it.