May the Farce Be With You Read Online Free

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 directorWallace 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.
    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 ‘deliciousand 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 .
    â€˜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 muchgood 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