Just Williams

Simon on actors’ comic instincts

WHEN PUSH COMES to shove, actors are survivors – with their backs to the wall, they’ll always find a way of getting the egg off their faces, often transferring it to others. If they forget a line they’ll turn to their hapless colleague and say, ‘What do you think?’ An old Shakespeare wallah thought he’d save himself the bother of learning a long speech and had it written out on a scroll of parchment that a young page had to deliver to him. One night, for devilment, the little whippersnapper presented him with a blank document. The old actor studied it for a moment, unflinching, then passed it back to him, ‘Prithee, thou read’st it to me, sirrah.’

My mother was once doing a review sketch with my father and ‘dried’ – smiling sweetly she turned to him and said, ‘Isn’t it your turn?’ It was the last time they acted together. When I was unsure of my lines on the first night of a production of Gigi , I told the prompter that if I helped myself to an unscheduled bit of liquorice from Gigi’s jar on the mantelpiece, it was a signal to whisper me the next line from behind the grate. I ate a lot of liquorice that night and sailed through; but I had a busy time of it afterwards – I’d forgotten what a good run for your money you got with the dreaded stuff.

The saying goes, ‘You can fool the world with tragedy, but comedy is serious business.’ Like eager ferrets, actors will always somehow root out a laugh with the nifty use of an eyebrow or a double take. They’ll hold the mirror up to nature – then pull a funny face. I was taught that giving your earlobe a gentle tug as you delivered a punchline would help do the trick. God knows why, but it works – give it a try.

The master of comedy is Ray Cooney – there’s not a trick in the book he doesn’t know, a lot of them handed down from his mentor Brian Rix. It’s astonishing that after 70 years of delivering door-slamming, trouser-dropping hilarity to packed audiences, Cooney goes un-knighted. Sadly, farce seems to be the unwashed guest at the party.

Donald Sinden, a great farceur, was a master of the quadruple entendre with the fruitiest of voices – even his stage whispers could be heard a mile away. In Twelfth Night as the pernickety Malvolio, he had to pass a sundial as he left the stage. He would glance at it, stop, turn back, take out his fob watch to check the time and then, against all expectation, and with some effort, set about shifting the sundial – brought the house down. As the brilliant Clive James wrote, ‘Comedy is common sense, dancing.’

Simon plays Justin Elliott in

The Archers