Uncerebral Simon, played strictly for laughs!
For
Neil Simon, the Prescription Was Farce.
"I was going through some difficult times,"
Neil Simon says. "This marriage I was in was breaking up. My daughter's husband was killed in an automobile accident. It seemed like rough going. And I said I wanted to work, because work is always a cathartic process for me, and I thought it would be really good just to get into a comedy."
Neil Simon is describing the genesis of his play Rumors. It is a farce, it is being directed by Kym Clayton, and this British version of Simon's original American version (but with the English spelling,
Rumours), is appearing for the first time on an Adelaide stage.
It opens Thursday November 19th 2015 at the Domain Theatre, Marion Cultural Centre, and it stars: Anita Canala, Linda Lawson, Lindy Le Cornu, Leanne Robinson, Ashleigh Merriel, Peter Davies, David Lockwood,
John Koch, Andy Winwood, and Andrew Clark.
There is an old theatrical saying that goes: "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." And these actors all have a ball proving how well they've mastered it!
Simon, in an interview at the time of the play's first appearance, said, "This is completely different for me, it's unlike anything I've ever written. It's my first farce. A farce is relentless," he says. "There are so many more obligations. It's relentless in its needs for plot twists, and to keep the comedy going. I had seen at one point a television show with
Peter Shaffer, whom I respect as much as any English-speaking writer, and the moderator was saying to him, "Why did you write Black Comedy?" And he said, "Because it was a challenge. It was a farce. And so I thought I'd see how far I could go with this thing, because it deals with a great deal of plot. And I rarely use plot. I use character development. In all other stories, the characters just seem to move to the next place, as life would have them move. But in the plot in a farce, you move them. The writer's in control all the way."
"The simplest aspect of farce is you need a lot of doors," he says. "And you need people to go running in and out of them, just missing each other. Generally speaking, in a farce people are trying to withhold information from other people. I've hardly seen a farce in which that didn't happen."
"Whereas with a farce, you have to start right from the top, not even page one, but line one, or you're in trouble. Everybody in the play has to be in trouble. I don't think one could do a leisurely farce. The words seem in opposition to each other. And I found that whenever the characters were not in jeopardy, I had to make just jokes, and the jokes weren't working, because they didn't have any sound basis... and so I had to keep all the characters in jeopardy. I was constantly looking for twists in the development of the plot, and adding more plot. The audience becomes a giant machine that sort of just eats dialogue, and eats plot. They want more and more and more of it. And there's no way you can write all that and make it as funny as you hopefully think it is in one draft, or two drafts. So I was up to, I think, the 10th draft."
"Keeping the ball in the air for a full-length farce is Herculean," he says, "especially with today's sophisticated audiences". It is most difficult and challenging. It tested Neil's ingenuity to a great extent - and boy, he's got a lot of ingenuity.
"One has to be alert 120 seconds a minute," he says. "It calls for such radar, because every moment counts, every tiny second is significant. You can't afford to have a wasted lift of an eyebrow."
Simon says the only way he can describe it is that it's very much like an artist doing an abstract painting. "If you're doing a landscape, you're out there in the country and you know what you're doing - you see the mountains, the trees, the river," he says. "Doing an abstract painting, you can't know exactly what's going to be there. You go by what you feel. "I remember watching Willem de Kooning painting on a PBS special that
Dustin Hoffman was hosting, and de Kooning was painting and talking, and he just seemed to love saying, "I think I need something there," and "I think I need something there," and finally he had the brush next to the canvas and pulled it away, and he said, "No, I'm finished." That's what I felt in this play. One has to come to a reasonable and satisfying conclusion, but it all seemed to go by instinct".
"You find out later on that your mind is more adroit than you think," he says. "The subconscious is doing the plotting when you don't realize it." He smiles. "It's called the muse, I think." Can he give a quick summary of where the muse led him? "The play started with the idea of doing a farce," he says. "The next thing was to do it as an elegant farce, because the farces in Moliere's days were generally about wealthy people. These aren't extremely wealthy people, but they are well-to-do. So I decided to dress them in evening clothes. There was something about having them dressed in evening clothes that I thought was a nice counterpoint to the chaos that was happening in the play. And so I picked a reason for them to be dressed elegantly, and it was a 10th anniversary".
"What happens," he says, "is that a couple arrives as the first guests, and they don't find anyone at home. The door is locked, and the husband goes around the back and comes in and finds that the host of the party is upstairs in bed in his pajamas, with a bullet hole through his earlobe. He is bleeding, and the hostess is nowhere to be found. There is no food that is cooked, and the servants who have been hired are gone, which seems to be a very odd situation. And considering the fact that the host, the man who is having his 10th anniversary, is the highly regarded public figure, they figure there must be some sort of dreadful thing going on, either political or marital. It would probably lead to a scandal, and since the first man who arrives is the host's lawyer, he's looking to protect him. And since the host has taken a number of sleeping pills, he's unable to tell the first couple what's going on".
"The rest of the first act is keeping the information from the other couples. Then it keeps getting more and more complicated. I guess if there's any kind of theme at all, it was the theme of rumors - how rumors can often come close to destroying friendships, even marital relationships. Because sometimes there is a basis to the rumors, and sometimes they're just twisted. I think we've all been victims of rumors, and they're very hurting."
Rumors is just one of Simon's huge repertoire of about 33 plays, since his first in 1960! He's also written about 20 movies in that time, though many were adaptations of his plays and not quite as much work as an original screenplay.
Galleon is presenting the BRITISH version of the play for the first time in Adelaide!
This fast-paced, fun-filled, fantastically frivolous production is on over 2 weeks from Wednesday 18th November to Saturday 28th November 2015.
Ticket prices and times
www.galleon.org.au or ring 0437 609 577
It's in the intimate Domain Theatre at the Marion Cultural Centre (with a choice of conventional or cabaret seating).
Come along, forget your cares for a night, and let the show divert you for a couple of hours, test yourself, and see if you can work who's done what, to who, and why, before all is revealed at the end!
