Serious business

Emily Mortimer on how her father John was asked by Kenneth Tynan to translate Feydeau’s farce and how she wishes he were still around to drink champagne with the current cast

It was in the middle of the Sixties that I had the opportunity of learning the true meaning of farce,’ my father wrote. That was the time he was palling around with Ken Tynan. He used to tell us about an election-night party at Tynan’s house, which included among the guests some life-size wax ladies dressed as nuns, who were to be found sitting on the loos and lying in abandoned attitudes on all the beds. It was the night of the 1966 election, when Harold Wilson’s Labour government got back in with a huge majority and, despite a terrible economic recession, the ‘permissive society’ was in full swing.

When he wasn’t throwing parties for wax-work nuns, the brilliant Tynan was also helping Laurence Olivier set up the National Theatre. They held board meetings in Nissen huts on a building site on the South Bank, while Olivier lunched on apples and champagne. Tynan asked my Dad if he’d like to translate a Feydeau farce called Puce à l’Oreille (A Flea in Her Ear) for the National.

My Dad says he knew nothing about farce until he read A Flea in Her Ear and discovered what a serious business it was. He said that Feydeau’s plays were really tragedies played at high speed, and that the plot of Othello, for instance, with its typical Feydeau prop of a lost handkerchief (in A Flea in Her Ear it’s a pair of braces), would make excellent farce material. In actual fact, farce was something that eminently suited my father’s sensibilites both as a writer and a man. And he already knew much more about it than he thought when he accepted Ken Tynan’s proposal.

Tynan’s proclivities were far too exotic to be deemed truly farcical, and Olivier lunching on apples and champagne was behaviour too eccentric to compare with anything Feydeau’s characters might get up to.