Read Online May the Farce Be With You by Roger Foss - Free Book Online

value, brand-new farces need to evolve organically, often painfully. Joe Orton’s Loot and What the Butler Saw under-went substantial changes before they became revered classics. Actors should be prepared to relearn pages of new dialogue or even an entire act and be ready to change physical stage business if it isn’t getting the laughs.
    6.   Physical dexterity is equal to the verbal agility required in farce. Actors need to be gym-fit to accomplish the physical consequences of the plot. To negotiate Feydeau’s ludicrous entanglements, the actors go through a complete body workout. In a typical Ray Cooney or Brian Rix farce, the actors are required to cope with props and objects that take on a life of their own, being bundled in and out of rooms or cupboards, juggling with multiple entrances exits and, morethan likely, going through several character transformations – and all at a galloping pace.
It was this progression to wild physical virtuosity which so impressed theatre critic Benedict Nightingale when Rix played an innocent Parliamentary Under-Secretary to an unfaithful government Minister in Michael Pertwee’s 1972 farce Don’t Just Lie There, Say Something (the cast included a very young Joanna Lumley): ‘Tell one tiny lie, and, before you know it, the need for consistency has forced you to pass off your brother as an Australian millionaire, hide your wife and mistress in the cocktail cabinet, slip dope into a police-man’s beer, and dress yourself up as a charwoman, probably forgetting to take off your false moustache in your panic.’ Phew!
    7.   Learn the art of timing: when to throw a line away; how to build several laughs on top of each other; how to hold up a scene to allow a big laugh to take its course; how to time an entrance or exit; how reactions generate laughter; how to carry on regardless when nobody laughs.
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    Is being seriously funny worth all the hard graft? Before he retired from the theatre in 1977, Brian Rix, one of the most successful farce actors that Britain has produced, told journalist Lynda Lee-Potter why it is: ‘I really do savour the pleasure of timing a line perfectly. It’s rather like changing gear properly or playing agood stroke at cricket, and of course there’s the sexual element. It’s like making love really well. It’s a deeply physical feeling. But then laughter itself is deeply physical – it involves an explosion of energy that can hit you like a sledgehammer in the theatre. A responsive audience whips you so it hurts.’

6. Let’s Farce the Music
    â€˜ If you really want to make an audience laugh, it’s the situation.’ – Stephen Sondheim
    A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on the way home from the theatre. I tore up my Frankie Howerd fan club card. Reprising the role of the devious Roman slave Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum seemed a good idea at the time, but Frankie’s performance turned out to be virtually titterless. For a devoted Frank-ophile, and also a devotee of a musical that is also one of the fastest, funniest farces ever to have been written, this was no laughing matter.
    I first became aware of Frankie Howerd when he was the popular star of the BBC’s Variety Bandbox (‘presenting the people of variety to a variety of people’), his trademark catchphrases such as ‘Not on your Nellie!’ and ‘I was am -aaaazed !’ spluttering out of the radio every fortnight. I joined the Howerd crowd decades before geeky university students wore tee shirts emblazoned with ‘Get Your Titters Out!’. But in 1986 a peculiarthing happened. Frankie went to Chichester and I went off Frankie.
    With the best years of his comedy career behind him, and playing too much on his leering Lurcio persona in Up Pompeii! , here was my all-time favourite stand-up starring in a revival of the musical in which he had triumphed in the 1960s,