John Cleese: how to write the perfect farce
I’ve always treasured farce. Good farce. Bad farce is embarrassing. Worse than that. Excruciating. And there is a lot of it about, because performing farce properly is much harder than acting ordinary comedy. The difficulty is that absurd situations have to be made believable. So, on one hand, the logic of the plot has to be impeccable; on the other, the actors have to find a way of making very eccentric behaviour credible. When a character makes a choice about what they are going to do – where to hide, which lie to tell, whether to brazen it out – the audience must be able to believe that the choice was a reasonable one. In the Fawlty Towers episode about Manuel’s rat, for example, we have to believe the health inspector’s reaction to seeing a live rat presented to him in a biscuit tin: the staff simply carry on as normal, to convince him it didn’t happen.
So, the perfect farce performer is one who can go “over the top” and take the audience with them. The perfect farce script is like clockwork: the writer winds it up by carefully establishing certain credible premises, and then lets the whole thing unwind, with inevitable but startling logic.
Despite the great farces of Michael Frayn and Alan Ayckbourn and Joe Orton and Alan Bennett, my heart always goes back to the late 19th and early 20th century and Georges Feydeau, the best of a crop of farce writers who kept Paris amused during the belle époque era. He produced more than 60 plays, and while he was regarded by contemporaries as a good popular entertainer, he is now recognised as one of France’s greatest dramatists.
Fawlty Towers: Basil the Rat
In 1966 I saw Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the Old Vic, with Albert Finney, directed by Jacques Charon of the Comédie-Française. It was the most brilliant comedy I’d ever seen. In the following years I took in more of his work: The Lady from Maxim’s, Cat Among the Pigeons, Hotel Paradiso, Fitting for Ladies and The Turkey. Once I had fully realised what a master of construction Feydeau was (and knowing I could never match him) I conceived an evil and despicable plan.
In 2008 I began to work my way through Feydeau’s less known works. My original plan was to steal a few of his best ideas and stitch them together into one play, but early on I read one, Monsieur Chasse, which the translator had retitled 13 Rue de L’Amour. It immediately struck me as flabby and shapeless, and when I found Act 1 ended with an unmotivated physical attack, I discarded it.
A week later, though, I picked it up again, and ploughed on out of a sense of duty. This time, bit by bit, I began to realise that a good plot was beginning to emerge from the uninspiring dialogue. Excited, I raced through to Act 3, and was thrilled that I had discovered a heavily camouflaged gem.
Trousers are dropped, with incriminating love letters in their pockets that are found by the wrong people
In a nutshell, Duchotel and Dr Moricet are close friends who don’t really like each other. Moricet has designs on Duchotel’s wife, Leontine, but she explains she could never be unfaithful to Duchotel unless he cheated on her. Moricet knows that Duchotel’s hunting trips are in search of two-legged prey. Trousers are dropped, with incriminating love letters in their pockets that are recovered by the wrong people.
It’s not exactly original, but it is so exquisitely woven that I immediately took it to my old friend Nicky Henson and told him I wanted him to direct it. I’d first met Nicky in 1966, when we shared a dressing room on our first day working together on The Frost Report. He turned out to be one of the best farceurs I ever saw on the London stage – quite brilliant in the original cast of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, as Gary Lejeune, the juvenile lead who keeps speaking such deeply felt actorish nonsense.
‘Comedy is in his blood’ … Nicky Henson, on far left, with Ronnie Corbett, John Cleese and Ronnie Barker in a 1966 episode of The Frost Report. Photograph: BBC
Comedy is in Nicky’s blood: his father, Leslie Henson, was the co-producer of (and performer in) the famous Aldwych farces, which were the funniest plays in the West End in the 1930s. We both got rather excited about working together again – the last time was when he played a part for me in the Fawlty Towers episode “The Psychiatrist”, as the medallion-strewn stud who causes Basil to start climbing ladders. Even more importantly, Nicky’s huge theatrical experience means he knows all about “stagecraft”, of which I am happily ignorant.
After this rather exciting moment … five years passed. I suddenly became aware of the financial demands resulting from my latest divorce, and so I spent a lot of time touring various one-man shows. Performing is always paid 10 times what you get from writing, even though writing is 10 times more difficult.
By the summer of 2015, the final chunk of alimony was dispatched and so I sat down with a literal translation of Feydeau’s original text of Monsieur Chasse, to embark on one of the most enjoyable writing jobs I’ve ever had.
Normally when I write comedy, there’s a lurking anxiety that I won’t be able to end the piece well, and this disquiet remains with me throughout, until I finally have to confront the bloody thing. But this time, Feydeau was providing me with a fiendishly clever ending, not quite hilarious, but so brilliantly crafted, bringing together all the threads of the story with a series of twists and turns, that the audience is left with a real sense of satisfaction that everything has been perfectly resolved.
By opening night, I'll have an artificial knee, two phony hips, a hearing aid and nine dental implants
Nevertheless, the first act did require a lot of work, with masses of new dialogue. There was one built-in rivalrous situation which I felt (cheekily) that Feydeau had not fully exploited, so I extended the characters’ interplay considerably, which allowed me to create a shorter proper ending to replace the unfunny physical assault. Altogether, this act took me about three weeks to write, but after that it was all downhill because the precision of Feydeau’s plotting took over. So the second act required mainly careful cutting and the third act needed only some tidying and polishing. Altogether, seven weeks’ work.
Nicky liked it and arranged a read-through with some of his old acting chums. It was a riot. I think it was my most satisfying experience since, at a Monty Python read-through, I read out “The Cheese Shop” and Michael Palin laughed so hard he fell off his chair.
Rehearsals are under way at the Mercury in Colchester, a lovely theatre with a clever, young, enthusiastic staff who love what they do. There’s only one problem. The writer has been forced to have another hip replacement. This means that by opening night he will have an artificial knee, two phony hips, lenses in both eyes, a hearing aid and nine dental implants. But what’s left of him hopes to make it to Colchester.
Bang Bang is at the Mercury theatre, Colchester, from 24 February to 11 March. mercurytheatre.co.uk.