May the Farce Be With You Read Online Free Page B
Author: Roger Foss
farce, Run For Your Wife , starringDanny Dyer, Neil Morrissey, Denise Van Outen and Kellie Shirley.
Of all the great twentieth-century farceurs, Ray Cooney is the last still standing.
Before we talk about your theatre work, can I ask you about your film adaptation of Run For Your Wife ? How on earth do you make such an intricately calibrated stage farce work on screen?
Some of my earlier plays were made into movies but they were 95 per cent the play with some location work inserted â basically, the stage play on screen. You couldnât get away with that today. If youâre trying to make a genuine movie you need to âopen it upâ as they say, although I like to quote the film version of Thereâs a Girl in My Soup as an example of opening up a successful stage comedy so much that they kind of lost the thread. Stage farces are generally claustrophobic, so in opening them up you have to be very careful.
Fortunately Run For Your Wife was the only play I have written with two sets in one â 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, Alleynâs, but I kept saying itâs 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 donât 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 â and that was it.
Were you already into comedy, even at that young age?
As an aspiring actor I didnât 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 couldnât afford a babysitter so they took me along with them to places like the Brixton Empire and weâd 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 âRoadâ 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 wasnât quite what I expected. Outside the village hall a
Of all the great twentieth-century farceurs, Ray Cooney is the last still standing.
Before we talk about your theatre work, can I ask you about your film adaptation of Run For Your Wife ? How on earth do you make such an intricately calibrated stage farce work on screen?
Some of my earlier plays were made into movies but they were 95 per cent the play with some location work inserted â basically, the stage play on screen. You couldnât get away with that today. If youâre trying to make a genuine movie you need to âopen it upâ as they say, although I like to quote the film version of Thereâs a Girl in My Soup as an example of opening up a successful stage comedy so much that they kind of lost the thread. Stage farces are generally claustrophobic, so in opening them up you have to be very careful.
Fortunately Run For Your Wife was the only play I have written with two sets in one â 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, Alleynâs, but I kept saying itâs 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 donât 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 â and that was it.
Were you already into comedy, even at that young age?
As an aspiring actor I didnât 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 couldnât afford a babysitter so they took me along with them to places like the Brixton Empire and weâd 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 âRoadâ 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 wasnât quite what I expected. Outside the village hall a
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