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Manipulating Audiences
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18899 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
1,531 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Once in a while the London theater throws up a play that is, on the one hand, dreadful as entertainment but, on the other hand, historically and anthropologically fascinating. This is especially true where humor is involved. As with other countries, there are certain types of British humor that are almost inaccessible to anyone who has not lived on this island long enough to become culturally and socially acclimatized. These can be understood easily enough, but are seldom really funny to the outsider. Sometimes even the adoptive insider finds it hard to laugh at them.
Comforting Quality
One of these is the classic modern British petit-bourgeois farce, which normally deals in silly vicars, puerile jokes about sex, dropped trousers, and almost always incipient adultery. The other, currently featured in Keith Waterhouse's Bookends at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, trades in donnish-cum-literary bores who are supposed to be funny because they are so awful. The comforting quality of this latter species, and most of the laughter it inspires, comes from a feeling of entre nous contempt, in the chummy spirit of schoolboys making mock of all those horrible adults.
Keith Waterhouse is an unlikely author to trade in such a product, because he is not an entre nous sort of writer. On the contrary, he has generally been something of a maverick writing affectionately about other mavericks, especially with work like Billy Liar and his last West End hit, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell [see "Peter O'Toole in Excelsis," The World & I, February 1990]; this was adapted from the journalism of a well-known British eccentric-cum-drunk. The show, a wonderful combination of anarchy, hilarious bad taste, devil-may-care wit, and glimpses into the armpit-world of the professional toper, ran successfully for many months, surviving the loss of Peter O'Toole and two changes of leading man.
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell has now been replaced by Bookends, also an adaptation, from the work (fictional this time) of a British journalist, Craig Brown. He, like Jeffrey Bernard, writes not only for the Spectator but also for various newspapers. His writing includes a column of rather pallid humor that appears twice a week in the Times. He is the author of books, too, one of which, The Marsh Marlow Letters, furnished the raw material for Bookends. It is archetypical entre nous material, attempting to make fun of (a) an extremely scruffy and boring academic-writer and (b) an extremely pimpant but commercially grotty publisher. These two begin and continue an
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