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. But my father came from the English professional middle classes. His father was a lawyer — specialising in wills and divorce (a very Feydeau-esque line of employment) — and my father himself had spent nearly half a lifetime as a defence barrister when he came to translate A Flea in Her Ear. ‘The world of farce is necessarily square, solid, respectable and totally sure of itself; only so it can be exploded,’ wrote my father.
What’s funny and tragic about farce — and also about life — is the gap between the picture that the ‘most dignified and moral’ people want to show of themselves and the slightly messier reality of who they actually are. In no arena is this gap more gaping than in the law. In the divorce and criminal courts, the petty dishonesties, illicit loves, stupidity and stubbornness of the bourgeoisie are dramatically exposed every day. And my father would come home every evening from the Inns of Court with farcical tales to tell.
He often recounted a particularly Feydeau-esque divorce case involving a distinguished Admiral who had fallen head over heels in love with a young figure skater. He had been driven so wild by the sight of his lover twiddling round on the ice that he had run out to join her without remembering to remove the guards from the bottom of his skates, and had consequently broken both his legs. So this same Admiral appeared in court and gave evidence about the sorry state of his marriage from the confines of a wheelchair. When asked about sexual relations with the wife he wanted to divorce, the crippled Admiral summarised thus, ‘We batted on for a number of years and then we drew stumps.’ I remember my Dad using this line to explain the importance of the sporting metaphor in English life.
There was another case in which my father represented a man who was accused of murdering his wife in the bath. When the judge discovered that the man in question had always been made to sit at the tap end while his wife wallowed at the other end in blissful comfort, he saw every reason to reduce the sentence to manslaughter. Remembering these stories, it is easy to see why my father had an intuitive understanding of the world of Feydeau — a world which he thought often seemed to be more true to the facts of life as we know them than many great tragedies.
Euphemisms for impotence — such as the Admiral’s ‘drawing stumps’ — are scattered all over A Flea in Her Ear; the most frequently repeated one being ‘nothing to declare’. Impotence is a typical problem for Feydeau men, who are often not in their first youth. In this case, the person with nothing to declare is our hero, Monsieur Chandebise, managing director of the Boston Life Insurance Company for Paris and the Provinces. Chandebise has settled, on the whole gratefully, for security, marriage and a few nights out at the theatre. His wife, Raymonde, is also an archetypical Feydeau heroine, being grown-up, but still somehow schoolgirlish. She very much regrets that it’s hard to take a lover without deceiving her husband. And Chandebise still envies his bachelor friends and casts a wary but interested eye towards the sleazy hotels he passes on his way home from the office. Feydeau’s plays, like all great drama, start at the moment when these small longings become alarming reality.
If the law prepared my Dad for the tone of Feydeau’s plays, it also prepared him for their morality. Essentially, there is no place for moralising in a Feydeau farce, neither is there in a court of law. My father was nothing if not endlessly forgiving — of himself as well as of everyone else. And it strikes me looking at the play again how non-judgmental it is. In part this is because it’s easy to forgive people when they don’t have time to behave as badly as they would like. Once the series of disasters has been set in motion, all the husbands and wives and mistresses and lovers have become so inextricably confused that it’s hard to tell if they’re being faithful or not, and there’s no time to jump into the vaguely longed-for bed as everyone’s running far too fast.
At first glance it’s hard to imagine why this caper involving respectable middle-class types almost coming undone was such a huge hit in London in 1966. But it occurs to me that, maybe, in the Swinging Sixties, putting on a French farce was the only available means of being truly subversive. Because at that time, no matter what you did, you were taking a position. In permissive, liberal Sixties London, even the very act of having sex became a political and moral statement — whether it was sex with one other person or more than one, or even just with yourself. Whereas Feydeau plays remained and still remain gloriously and unabashedly apolitical and amoral.
For this reason, I think A Flea in Her Ear still has a whiff of danger to it. In 2010 we still feel we have to take a stance on everything — from what we think about fidelity, to economic reform, to global warming (a subject my father found excruciatingly boring). We are all politicised and opinionated and, because we all are, it’s not very exciting. What is exciting is the odd moment when someone admits to all the confusion of life in a breezy, unreconstructed, unFreudian but slightly baffled way. Lines such as Raymonde’s ‘Well, I may want to deceive him, but for him to deceive me! No! It’s going too far!’ still somehow feel a little bit thrilling.
My father wrote, ‘The construction of a Feydeau play is so wonderful that another playwright can only look at it with the awe with which a junior maths master might approach the works of Einstein.’ He was amazed by the precision and perfection of the play, which is written like a musical score, with incredibly detailed stage directions and something like 250 openings and closings of doors. He also said that Feydeau’s
concern was events and he didn’t write many verbal jokes. So, in translating him, my Dad felt no compunction about supplying a number of his own. But he admitted noticing his jokes never got as many laughs as workmanlike Feydeau lines such as ‘What?’, ‘Who?’ or ‘I can’t believe it!’ said at precisely the right moment.
In fact, my father’s translation couldn’t have been more brilliant, more integral to the success of that first production at the National, or more distinguished in its provenance. He has described reading and rereading it until ‘I hoped it didn’t sound like a translation at all, but made the listeners feel they could understand French.’ As a child, my father had been taken to see Laurence Olivier play Hamlet. He could remember everything about that production, from the shape of the set to the taste of the sandwiches during the interval.
He never imagined that years later he would be sitting with Olivier in the prefabs behind the National, drinking champagne, eating apples and arguing their way through every line of the translation to make sure the laughs were in exactly the right place. He described them as happy days. Actually, I don’t think he could believe his luck.
And if only he were still around today, he wouldn’t be able to believe his luck all over again. To have his translation of this play back in production, where it started, on the stage of the Old Vic would have thrilled him utterly. My Dad was never happier than when he was sitting in a read-through, with actors saying his lines. If only he could have been there at the first rehearsal to see his great friend Richard Eyre presiding over such brilliant actors as Tom Hollander, Lisa Dillon, Jonathan Cake and his much-loved godson Freddie Fox as they read out the play for the first time. With any luck, he somehow was — the prerequisite bottle of champagne in his script bag under the table and all the hope and expectation of a production about to be set in motion. I would have given anything to see the gleeful little look in his eye and hear that thin, girlish laugh of his — partly in delight at something funny he’d written, partly in delight at the whole situation.
‘
Comments