The pride of the Woosters
British actor-writer Robert Goodale talks to James Croot about bringing PG Wodehouse’s classic literary characters to life.
Robert Goodale has a confession to make – he didn’t like the popular 1990s television adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.
Starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, the Bafta-winning ITV series ran for 23 episodes across four years, but Goodale, who is bringing the first stage play adaptation of the characters to Wellington next month, admits he doesn’t think the televisual medium allowed them to be at their finest.
‘‘Fry and Laurie were amazing, but I thought the characters around them didn’t quite work because they were having to play them in a televisual, truthful way.
‘‘As with Pinter, Shakespeare or Noel Coward, if you play them naturalistically the whole thing just drops on the floor and just won’t work. Sure, they have to be played with very truthful intentions, but the slightlyheightened style has to be recognised.’’
Which is exactly how Goodale and twin-brother David have encouraged their actors to perform in Perfect Nonsense, an adaptation of the 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters (one of the 46 tales Wodehouse wrote about the dimwitted, calamity-prone English toff Bertie Wooster and his suave, shrewd manservant Jeeves).
To be fair, there are actually only three of them, with Joseph Chance playing Jeeves, Matthew Carter taking on Bertie and Goodale himself bringing to life all the other eclectic range of eccentric characters, from Gussie Fink-Nottle to Sir Watkin Bassett.
‘‘I do love playing Aunt Dahlia, and Roderick Spode, because he’s such a hideous character,’’ he says, before adding that the key to performing Wodehouse is recognising the musicality of language.
‘‘The wit of it won’t come across unless it is spoken the way he wrote it. Some of the passages of dialogue are almost like arias. You can’t break them up, you can’t pause, you’ve just got to allow them to roll off your tongue.’’
Goodale says his first brush with Wodehouse came about 30 years ago when he was looking for material to use in a one-man show. ‘‘I remembered that my twin brother had loved it and that he used to quote it back and forth with a friend of his. I had always found it hysterical when they did it at 2am while drinking lots of whisky, but I was never sure at the time if it was the whisky or the Wodehouse. When I reopened the books, I realised it was pure Wodehouse.
‘‘It became apparent immediately that, because of the way the books were narrated by Bertie Wooster, it would work brilliantly on the stage.
‘‘It is though he is addressing an audience of 300 people, talking like a raconteur or vaudevillian performer. Only later did I read Wodehouse’s autobiography where he reveals that he regarded his characters like a group of actors sitting around waiting for him to write more material.’’
Then, a few years ago, when the brothers approached the Wodehouse estate about their proposed adaptation of Code, they discovered that the author himself had tried to turn the very same novel into a play.
‘‘They handed us a letter he had written to his very good friend Bill Townsend in which he says ‘I’m trying to get Code of the Woosters to work as a play, but I’m failing miserably, wondering if you can help me?’,’’ says Goodale. ‘‘Apparently, he did put it on, but it just didn’t really work.’’
When asked why he thinks it failed, Goodale refers back to the same letter.
‘‘He says he wanted to set it all in one place – he was turning it into a drawing-room comedy.’’
That was a lesson the Goodales were keen to learn, although Robert Goodale admits they’ve only been able to come at it from a ‘‘completely different angle’’ because time has moved on and allowed new theatrical endeavours and ways of seeing things to evolve.
‘‘What we’ve done is make it a play within a play, a farce within a farce. That’s what it needs to be – high energy and high octane on every single level. Wodehouse also talked in his letter about getting rid of what we considered to be some of the best characters we have in the show. If only I could go back in time and tell him – ‘no, you’ve got that wrong’.
‘‘Having said that, if he’d been writing today he might well have come up with something like this and put us out of the job. Having talked to the Wodehouse estate, we know that he would highly approve of what we’ve done with his work because we’re so reverential to it.
‘‘Some people have tried to ‘rewrite’ Wodehouse, which I think is the most dreadful mistake. What we’ve done is used a lot of his stuff as written, but at the same time written our own stuff to go around it.’’
Goodale says the great thing about writing with his brother is there’s no politeness involved when it comes to deciding what’s in or out. ‘‘You are just truthful about whether you think something is going to work or not. And we keep working at something until we know we’ve got it. Yes, we fight sometimes, but usually at the end of it we got to the point where we go – ‘brilliant, we’ve got it’.’’
The end result of their hard labour is a production (originally featuring Matthew Macfadyen and Stephen Mangan) that had a sellout year on London’s West End and won the Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2014, before going on three successful UK tours, a season in Mumbai and now a trip, which includes Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
When asked if the show required tweaking for international audiences, Goodale says ‘‘no’’, for a very good reason. ‘‘You can second-guess people so wrongly. There were places we thought it wasn’t going to work at all and it absolutely did. I guess there are so many different elements to it – farce, panto, theatrical comedy, as well as the genius of Wodehouse. All those things combined seem to make it available to a huge cross-section of people and ages. I’ve even seen a four-year-old in hysterics at the show. They can’t have understood the plot, they must have just loved the physicality of it.
‘‘Going to India with it was interesting because they were so astute on the language – we got more laughs around that than anywhere else we’ve performed it. On the flipside, some of the physicality didn’t work there. So, in a way I think we’re better to leave it as it is and let people take what they want to take from it. After all, there is plenty of stuff to do that with.’’
Perfect Nonsense, St James Theatre, Wellington, September 8 to 11. Book at Ticketek.