Directed by Valerie Clarke
May 10, 11 & 12, 2001

Programme Notes        [ Photographs ]

Ray Cooney began his theatrical career in 1946 as a boy in Song of Norway at the Palace Theatre. He served his apprenticeship by playing in various repertory companies from Worthing to Blackburn before graduating to Brian Rix's company at the Whitehall Theatre in 1956.

He played Dry Rot and Simple Spymen and then began a writing career which, to date, has produced seventeen West End plays including One for the Pot (co-written with Tony Hilton), Not Now Darling, Move Over Mrs Markham, There Goes the Bride (all co-written with John Chapman), Chase me Comrade, Why Not Stay For Breakfast?, Wife Begins at Forty, Run for your Wife!, Two into One, Out of Order and Funny Money.

As a producer and director he has been responsible for over thirty London productions, including Lloyd George Knew My Father, Whose Life is it Anyway?, They're Playing Our Song, Duet for One, Bodies, Chicago, Clouds and Children of a Lesser God.

In 1983, Cooney formed the Theatre of Comedy Company (bringing together the founder members consisting of Thirty West End stars) and he became its first Artistic Director.

During his tenure, the company produced over twenty plays including Run for Your Wife, Out of Order, Two into One, Passion Play and the acclaimed revivals of See How they Run, Loot, When We are Married and Pygmalion starring Peter O'Toole and John Thaw.

During his hectic theatrical career, Cooney has always found time to continue acting and played the last year of Run for your Wife in London before appearing in the New York production. Recently he played the lead in It Runs in the Family and Funny Money.

Ray has been married to Linda for nearly thirty five years and has two sons, Michael (author of Cash on Delivery!) and Danny.

The Encyclopædia Britannica defines farce as:

a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots, but it has been sustained by its popularity in performance and has persisted throughout the Western world to the present.

It was in 15th-century France that the term farce was first used to describe the elements of clowning, acrobatics, caricature, and indecency found together within a single form of entertainment. Such pieces were initially bits of impromptu buffoonery inserted by actors into the texts of religious plays--hence the use of the Old French word farce, "stuffing." Such works were afterward written independently, the most amusing of the extant texts being Maistre Pierre Pathelin (c. 1470). French farce spread quickly throughout Europe, notable examples being the interludes of John Heywood in 16th-century England. Shakespeare and Molière eventually came to use elements of farce in their comedies.

Farce continued throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, in France Eugène Labiche's An Italian Straw Hat (1851) and Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear (1907) being notable successes. Farce also surfaced in music hall, vaudeville, and boulevard entertainments.

Farce survived in the 20th century in such plays as Charley's Aunt (1892) by Brandon Thomas and found new expression in film comedies with Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Kops, and the Marx Brothers. The farces presented at the Aldwych Theatre, London, between the world wars were enormously popular, and numerous successful television comedy shows attest to the durability of the form.