Theatre blog
Where is the new Feydeau?
Audiences are packing London's Comedy Theatre for Marc Camoletti's vintage farce Boeing-Boeing, but where are his successors?
John M Morrison
Mon 19 Mar 2007 04.00 EDT
Mark Rylance and Tamzin Outhwaite in Boeing-Boeing. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Old-fashioned farce seems to be in rude health on the London stage, if the reaction of audiences to the revival of Marc Camoletti's Boeing-Boeing at the Comedy Theatre is any indication. Mark Rylance gives the comic performance not just of the year, but of the decade, reducing packed houses to waves of helpless laughter.
For us lovers of farce, who think Feydeau is just as important as Ibsen, it is an evening of sheer joy. Roger Allam is the Paris man-about-town who shares his bed with three international air hostesses. Rylance is his blundering friend and Frances de la Tour is a grumpy maid. The timing is split-second, but there's a strong foundation of character comedy too.
Boeing-Boeing deserves to be a stonking hit, and it follows the successful West End revivals of See How They Run and Donkey's Years in 2006. Today's actors and directors don't have the chance to perfect their skills by performing farce all year round as in the days of Brian Rix's Whitehall company half a century ago, but they're more than equal to the challenge. And the audiences are up for it, if the shows are genuinely funny. So where's the problem?
All these shows are revivals. Boeing-Boeing first landed on this side of the Channel in 1961, See How They Run dates from the 1940s and Donkey's Years is an early work by Michael Frayn, creator of the incomparable Noises Off. His contemporary Ray Cooney, born in 1932, is also still around but his recent play Tom, Dick and Harry flopped in the West End in 2005, failing to repeat the success of 2001's Caught In the Net.
Other writers, including Tom Stoppard and Peter Shaffer, have successfully borrowed from the art of farce for their own purposes. I would put Joe Orton into this category, and more recently Terry Johnson. But the old-fashioned pursuit of laughter for its own sake seems to have fallen out of fashion among the more recent generation of playwrights. With the exception of Martin McDonagh, Charlotte Jones and the excellent Steve Thompson, author of Whipping It Up, good new writers of stage comedy are few and far between. Writers of new farces are absent altogether.
Why is this? To some extent, farce has migrated from the theatre into situation comedies on television. The other reason, I think, is that writing farce is extremely difficult, and there's nowhere left to learn the trade. Comedy is built on words, but farce is three-dimensional engineering. I've tried it myself and sweated blood in the attempt. Feydeau once compared the genre to clock making, but the repertory companies that allowed him to learn his skills no longer exist. There are courses and workshops in how to write horror films, soap operas and a host of other genres, but nobody I know of is teaching the art of farce. Perhaps they should be.