May the Farce Be With You by Roger Foss

Author:Roger Foss [Foss, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat
Publisher: Oberon Books Ltd.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I fell upon them with the rapturous excitement of Ben Gunn lighting upon the treasure of Captain Flint. They were not merely plays to read. Each one of them was a guidebook to the technique of stagecraft. I studied them as such, counting and noting the number of speeches and the method of plot and character development. I discovered for myself the real secret of Pinero’s mastery, namely his attention to every line and in every scene the importance of climax.

Stagey old museum pieces they may appear today. But the present-day playwright still relies, for many of his most successful effect, on the rules laid down and illustrated by that old master craftsman.

Just as influential on the development of British farce as we now know it was another eminent Victorian master of the rules of the game. John Maddison Morton (1811-1891), once hailed by Kenneth Tynan as ‘the founding father of British farce’, was creating wildly popular stage farces long before Pinero was born. While some of Pinero’s farces have ended up as Antiques Roadshow theatre, occasionally wheeled out to reveal how their polished comic values can still shine, Morton’s vast store of deftly constructed pre-Pinero rib-ticklers, mostly based on situations that might arise in day-to-day mid-Victorian life, have been consigned to the dusty old world of archivists and academia.

Rarely revived today, his short farces – he wrote around 125 and every top comedy actor of his day appeared in them in theatres across the UK – were invariably performed as afterpieces on a bill or slotted in to the main fare. His plots and themes hit the Victorian funny bone because they were very much of the people, usually grounding a gallery of lower-middle-class characters in a familiar domestic reality that invariably goes haywire through a series of misunderstandings, mistaken identities and elaborate plot devices before some semblance of homely normality is eventually restored.

In bidding farewell to the upper-class comfort zone of earlier eighteenth-century farce, Morton took the everyday anxieties of Victorian living and made them funny. Like Pinero, Morton happily helped himself to the theatrical inventions of French farceurs, while leaving out the saucy bits. His hilarious Box and Cox (1847), which has strong claims to be the most popular of all Victorian farces (Queen Victoria laughed so much that she saw it performed twice), combines the plots of Une Chambre pour Deux (1839), by E.F. Prieur and A. Letorzec, and Frisette (1846), by Eugène Labiche and A. Lefranc, and is subtitled as ‘A Romance in Real Life’, flagging-up a spoof of contemporary melodrama.

The premise of the comedy in Box and Cox is simple: a money-grabbing lodging housekeeper rents the same room to two men, one occupying it by day and one by night, without either’s knowing about the other. John Box, a journeyman printer, is hard at work at a newspaper office all night, and doesn’t come home till the morning, while James Cox, a journeyman hatter, is busy making hats all day long, and doesn’t come home till night.

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