Sheridan's The Critic, BBC, 1982
I appear to have come in second in the reviewer category in Strange Horizons' reader's poll about 2012. Cool. Many congratulations to those who won, in all categories.
Spent large portions of this evening laughing, which was also pleasant.
Nineweaving, thirty years ago, happened to see on television a BBC production of Richard Sheridan's The Critic, which was so memorable that she spent thirty years attempting to track it down so that she could watch it again. It is not really available, as such, but she now has it, and brought it over.
There are comedies and there are comedies. Most things I think are funny are things during which I spend a while laughing, when somebody says something funny, and then a while waiting, and then somebody says something funny again. In this particular instance, I laughed for the last half hour continuously so hard that I had trouble breathing, so hard that I think I was whooping, so hard that I couldn't really hold myself up. There were tears. If I had been on the couch to start with, I would not have been able to stay on it, so I am glad I began on the floor. My wife and Nineweaving were both in similar states. I have been breaking into spontaneous giggling ever since just thinking about it.
What this was, this specific piece of cinema, was the carefully planned apotheosis of the theatrical fiasco.
Sheridan's play has a moderately amusing first act, in which he skewers various things that were wrong with playwrights and theatrical practice of the day, and in which there are several entertaining musical jokes. Then Mr. Puff, who started his writing career by basically inventing advertising, and writes that way, runs a rehearsal of his tragedy The Spanish Armada. It is a truism among classics students that the Roman playwright Terence's comedy The Mother-in-Law is the worst play ever written, in that no performance of it has ever been successfully completed without the audience resorting to violence. I have believed that for many years. I was wrong. The worst play ever written is Mr. Puff's The Spanish Armada, if one could take it seriously, which of course one can't, and isn't meant to.
So this film has a whole lot of really wonderful British character actors. Mr. Puff is played by Hywel Bennett, just two years off his turn as Ricki Tarr in the original Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and here completely unrecognizable. The cast includes Nigel Hawthorne, Rosemary Leach, and Anna Massey, and there is an absolutely priceless and indescribable cameo by John Gielgud. And all of these actors have devoted themselves entirely to performing, in a manner which gets more and more and more horrific as it goes along, the worst play ever written.
It's a truism in comedy that you can't know the character you are playing is funny. Indeed, none of these people know themselves to be funny. The genius bit is that every one of them knows, with bitter, bone-deep knowledge, how stark-raving, hilariously terrible every single other person on or near that stage is being. Every one of them is the sole sane voice in a land of total lunatics. Every single one. The writer blames the actors, who have cut all his best lines, and who are not doing the gestures exactly as he showed them. The actors blame the writer, who has them saying all the wrong things, and also has not given any of them enough lines, ever. The stage crew blame the stage manager and the writer, for making them set up the entire Spanish bloody Armada, complete with cannon; the writer would like to know why the stage crew always have to sound as many cannon as possible and all at the same time. The stage manager (a brilliant acting job this) manages to convey, entirely with his hangdog eyes and the set of his shoulders, that he has been aware since he came to the age of reason that his fate is in the hands of an angry and malicious deity, with whose machinations he is by now all too sadly familiar. The verve with which he tears entire pages from the script, crumples them, and throws them over his shoulder must be seen to be believed.
And the orchestra are not being paid enough for this. There is not enough money in the world. The moment, during a dispute between the writer and the stage hands about the disposition of some scenery, when the stage manager comes out and tells them, "If you've got any entr'acte music, you'd better play it now-- this may take a while..." How the hell do you make Purcell sound resigned?
I was laughing very hard during the Unexpected Reunion Scene, as the judge tells the poor stripling "I am your father. This is your mother. This is your uncle. This, your first cousin," indicating the courtroom at large, all of whom turn out to be relations. I was choking during Tiburina's anticlimactic mad scene: "Enter Tiburina, mad, in white satin, and her confidante, mad, in white linen," as the satisfied writer pronounces. By the time we got to 'Rule Britannia' during the sinking of the Spanish Armada, complete with tableau vivant of Father Thames, inexplicably in some sort of tutu and surrounded by gentleman representing his banks ("You idiot! You've got both your banks on one side of you!") All Was Lost. It just keeps getting worse. And worse. And worse. It is not readily describable.
The thing is, every single thing they do terribly is a thing I have seen actually done, in theatre, something I've seen work to great emotional effect. You can even write that damn Reunion Scene well, if you work at it. You know what they're trying to do, and you know how well it would work if they managed, and then it explodes in their faces, sometimes literally, in a cascading series of ludicrous events which even the company begin to recognize must be ludicrous, and yet they keep going, hoping that somehow, something, maybe it will be all right on the night, but it won't. It just can't be. It becomes a black hole of ridiculousness, having crossed some sort of event horizon beyond which anything anyone tries to do just makes it worse and funnier. It is bad theatre for the ages. It is bad theatre such that if one had been involved with it in any capacity in real life and it weren't intentional, the only hope would be to change one's name, move to Greenland, and take up sheep-farming. It is bad theatre beyond theatrical dreams of badness, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for the people who managed, somehow, to make that happen on purpose. It is bad theatre worth remembering for thirty years and obtaining in some manner or other from the internet. It is just. That. Bad.
As I struggled to get my breathing back under some kind of control, I heard my wife moaning incoherently from the couch something in which the words "... and just kept frolicking" were audible, and lost it all over again.
If you are at all interested in theatre, you owe it to yourself to track this down and watch it. My stomach muscles hurt, six hours later.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
Spent large portions of this evening laughing, which was also pleasant.
Nineweaving, thirty years ago, happened to see on television a BBC production of Richard Sheridan's The Critic, which was so memorable that she spent thirty years attempting to track it down so that she could watch it again. It is not really available, as such, but she now has it, and brought it over.
There are comedies and there are comedies. Most things I think are funny are things during which I spend a while laughing, when somebody says something funny, and then a while waiting, and then somebody says something funny again. In this particular instance, I laughed for the last half hour continuously so hard that I had trouble breathing, so hard that I think I was whooping, so hard that I couldn't really hold myself up. There were tears. If I had been on the couch to start with, I would not have been able to stay on it, so I am glad I began on the floor. My wife and Nineweaving were both in similar states. I have been breaking into spontaneous giggling ever since just thinking about it.
What this was, this specific piece of cinema, was the carefully planned apotheosis of the theatrical fiasco.
Sheridan's play has a moderately amusing first act, in which he skewers various things that were wrong with playwrights and theatrical practice of the day, and in which there are several entertaining musical jokes. Then Mr. Puff, who started his writing career by basically inventing advertising, and writes that way, runs a rehearsal of his tragedy The Spanish Armada. It is a truism among classics students that the Roman playwright Terence's comedy The Mother-in-Law is the worst play ever written, in that no performance of it has ever been successfully completed without the audience resorting to violence. I have believed that for many years. I was wrong. The worst play ever written is Mr. Puff's The Spanish Armada, if one could take it seriously, which of course one can't, and isn't meant to.
So this film has a whole lot of really wonderful British character actors. Mr. Puff is played by Hywel Bennett, just two years off his turn as Ricki Tarr in the original Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and here completely unrecognizable. The cast includes Nigel Hawthorne, Rosemary Leach, and Anna Massey, and there is an absolutely priceless and indescribable cameo by John Gielgud. And all of these actors have devoted themselves entirely to performing, in a manner which gets more and more and more horrific as it goes along, the worst play ever written.
It's a truism in comedy that you can't know the character you are playing is funny. Indeed, none of these people know themselves to be funny. The genius bit is that every one of them knows, with bitter, bone-deep knowledge, how stark-raving, hilariously terrible every single other person on or near that stage is being. Every one of them is the sole sane voice in a land of total lunatics. Every single one. The writer blames the actors, who have cut all his best lines, and who are not doing the gestures exactly as he showed them. The actors blame the writer, who has them saying all the wrong things, and also has not given any of them enough lines, ever. The stage crew blame the stage manager and the writer, for making them set up the entire Spanish bloody Armada, complete with cannon; the writer would like to know why the stage crew always have to sound as many cannon as possible and all at the same time. The stage manager (a brilliant acting job this) manages to convey, entirely with his hangdog eyes and the set of his shoulders, that he has been aware since he came to the age of reason that his fate is in the hands of an angry and malicious deity, with whose machinations he is by now all too sadly familiar. The verve with which he tears entire pages from the script, crumples them, and throws them over his shoulder must be seen to be believed.
And the orchestra are not being paid enough for this. There is not enough money in the world. The moment, during a dispute between the writer and the stage hands about the disposition of some scenery, when the stage manager comes out and tells them, "If you've got any entr'acte music, you'd better play it now-- this may take a while..." How the hell do you make Purcell sound resigned?
I was laughing very hard during the Unexpected Reunion Scene, as the judge tells the poor stripling "I am your father. This is your mother. This is your uncle. This, your first cousin," indicating the courtroom at large, all of whom turn out to be relations. I was choking during Tiburina's anticlimactic mad scene: "Enter Tiburina, mad, in white satin, and her confidante, mad, in white linen," as the satisfied writer pronounces. By the time we got to 'Rule Britannia' during the sinking of the Spanish Armada, complete with tableau vivant of Father Thames, inexplicably in some sort of tutu and surrounded by gentleman representing his banks ("You idiot! You've got both your banks on one side of you!") All Was Lost. It just keeps getting worse. And worse. And worse. It is not readily describable.
The thing is, every single thing they do terribly is a thing I have seen actually done, in theatre, something I've seen work to great emotional effect. You can even write that damn Reunion Scene well, if you work at it. You know what they're trying to do, and you know how well it would work if they managed, and then it explodes in their faces, sometimes literally, in a cascading series of ludicrous events which even the company begin to recognize must be ludicrous, and yet they keep going, hoping that somehow, something, maybe it will be all right on the night, but it won't. It just can't be. It becomes a black hole of ridiculousness, having crossed some sort of event horizon beyond which anything anyone tries to do just makes it worse and funnier. It is bad theatre for the ages. It is bad theatre such that if one had been involved with it in any capacity in real life and it weren't intentional, the only hope would be to change one's name, move to Greenland, and take up sheep-farming. It is bad theatre beyond theatrical dreams of badness, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for the people who managed, somehow, to make that happen on purpose. It is bad theatre worth remembering for thirty years and obtaining in some manner or other from the internet. It is just. That. Bad.
As I struggled to get my breathing back under some kind of control, I heard my wife moaning incoherently from the couch something in which the words "... and just kept frolicking" were audible, and lost it all over again.
If you are at all interested in theatre, you owe it to yourself to track this down and watch it. My stomach muscles hurt, six hours later.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.