Ray Cooney is probably still Britain’s
greatest living farceur; in the 1980s, his
Run For Your Wife became one of the
first West End shows whose duration could be given in geologic ages
rather than calendar years. But, well, time passes. Cooney is now
almost 82, his direction shows experience but little energy, and his
own appearance in the doddery-waiter role of this 1981 play seems
calculated to elicit affection in the audience rather than admiration
of his stage business.
The world of the play is one in which a junior government minister and
his wife don pyjamas and a “naughty nightie” for their respective
extra-marital flings one afternoon in adjoining rooms in a Westminster
hotel. It is a world in which the mere mention of gayness (to explain
away the odd behaviour of the civil servant whom the minister has
enlisted to facilitate his tryst) is assumed to raise at least a mild
frisson. It is a world in which, above all, the minister’s name is
milked for repeated laughs: he is Dickie Willey, M.P.
Cooney the playwright structures his farcical activity with precision
and enthusiasm: he requires of designer Julie Godfrey a principal set
with six entrances (three in each of the adjoining rooms), and makes
full use of them all. Cooney the director, however, simply never whips
his cast into the kind of het-up pace on which farce depends, with its
repeated instances of characters missing each other by just
this much. Michael Praed as Willey
in particular remains comparatively languid even when he is supposed to
be speeding his face off after necking the wrong kind of pills. Nick
Wilton fares rather better as the hapless George Pigden, who is the
real hub of all the confusion, but Cooney seems to leave him to his own
devices rather than encourage his moments of frenzy. Jeffrey Holland of
Hi-De-Hi! fame provides
systematically rumpled dignity as the hotel manager, and Josefina
Gabrielle as Mrs Willey offers enthusiasm but her role serves primarily
to show how staid good clean smut was a third of a century ago. I did
not like
The Duck House at
all as a play when it opened in the West End a few months ago, but its
staging could give Cooney an object lesson in the importance of playing
matters in top farcical gear.
Written for the Financial
Times.