May the Farce Be With You Read Online Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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 peoplein 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.

3. A Conversation with Cooney
    â€˜ 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