I say, Jeeves, these coves might just do beloved Bertie justi
As Wodehouse’s greatest creation comes to the West En
ACTORS Stephen Mangan and Matthew Macfadyen, two dashing dudes, are undergoing a strange transition. Rehearsals have started for their new show — a stage adaptation of one of our great comic novels — and they are morphing from modern metropolitan pin-ups into something rather less of-the-moment.
You see, they are about to put on a stage version of P.G. Wodehouse. And it so happens that the great Wodehouse is my favourite writer.
Macfadyen will be playing Thirties manservant Jeeves, along with other roles including a bosomy aunt, a soppy debutante and a monocle-popping tartar of a magistrate.
It is quite a change for a man whose past roles have included MI5’s Tom Quinn in Spooks and Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice.
Mangan, best known as Guy Secretan in Channel 4’s Green Wing, will be Jeeves’s implausibly twittish toff of an employer, Bertie Wooster.
The novel is Wodehouse’s The Code Of The Woosters, first published in 1938 and arguably the best-known of the Jeeves books.
Ah, the peerless Jeeves, ‘gentleman’s gentleman’ and serene, impenetrable cross between executive troubleshooter and angel of mercy.
Wodehouse is, for many of us, The Master. The England he describes may have long gone, if it ever really existed, but his humour is timeless. It consists of powerful bullies meeting their comeuppance and of genial simpletons muddling through and somehow surviving the most terrible pratfalls.
My grandfather, a Latin teacher who was wounded three times in the Great War, had banks of Wodehouse books. Perhaps it was taking orders in the trenches, from generals sitting miles from the front line, that addicted him to Wodehouse’s subversive wit. Perhaps the classicist in him liked the economy of the prose, too.
My father was also a schoolmaster, t hough never a chin- stroking academic. He loved Wodehouse’s gift for slapstick, his delightful lack of pretentiousness. You could call it schoolboy humour.
Well, I inherited it. Wodehouse dishes up cheery caricatures, farcical disasters and implausible solutions. He is pure escapism, and don’t we all need a bit of that from time to time?
The inimitable Jeeves is pure bliss. He can shimmer silently into Bertie’s bedroom mid-morning, gently pull open the curtains and administer a proprietary hangover cure.
The noggin makes Bertie’s eyeballs hurtle out of their sockets, bounce off the wall like bloodshot squash balls, and return to position with an instant sense of relief.
A few hours later the same Jeeves will be acting as a genius fixer, solving the scrapes in which Bertie repeatedly lands himself — disasters seemingly so fraught and complex they make the Israel-Palestine Question look like the mating flight of two cabbage whites in an English kitchen garden.
My dad would read and re-read and re-re-read not just the Jeeves stories but also the books about workdodger Ukridge and those featuring imperturbable Psmith (the p is silent, ‘as in pshrimp’).
Psmith is a languid survivor of countless career prangs who every time seems somehow to levitate above catastrophe. I remember my father reading Psmith Journalist on a ferry from Alicante to Ibiza in the Seventies while sitting on deck in his straw hat and open-toed sandals.
He was completely lost in the book and was wriggling his badly-trimmed toenails with delicious pleasure, laughing out loud at Wodehouse’s comic gold. Our Spanish fellow passengers looked at him rather as the Conquistadors must have inspected the Incas’ cooking.
So now this giant of English comedy is to be staged on the West End. Advance publicity for the forthcoming play, Perfect Nonsense, depicts Macfadyen with a cocktail shaker, butler’s coat-tails, boot-polished hair and one foot off the floor as he leaps to his young master’s whims.
Mangan, meanwhile, has a large kisscurl, a brimming martini glass and an expression of hoorayish, fnarr-fnarr booziness. Shades of Sir Les Patterson, Australian cultural attache.
It is not going to be a full-costume, big-cast production with opulent scenery and props and proscenium-arch predictability. Quite the opposite. Apart from contributions from a third actor, Mark Hadfield, Messrs Mangan and Macfadyen will enact the whole story. So: an experimental production of Wodehouse. Could be interesting.
‘Tim Rice did a musical called By Jeeves but we think this is the first time the Wodehouse estate has sanctioned a straight-forward stage adaptation of one of the novels,’ says David Goodale, who has written Perfect Nonsense with his brother Bobby.
Wodehouse died in his adopted home of America in 1975. The trustees of his literary estate were given a boileddown preview of the Goodale script and encouraged to make suggestions.
As a result, Jeeves will be portrayed as roughly the same age as Bertie. ‘I had always imagined him being older but the estate felt quite strongly that the two of them were the same age,’ says Goodale.
Wodehouse is notoriously difficult to dramatise. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie did it for television, as did Dennis Price and Ian Carmichael, but although both series had their moments, they were far below the genius of the novels.
Wodehouse’s brilliance lies in his prose style — economical yet packed with linguistic starbursts, the comic rhythm tight, each sentence mown to an inch of its life.
Wodehouse is ace superb at surreal similes. In Uncle Fred In The Springtime he describes the moustache of a harrumphing duke ‘ rising and falling like seaweed on an ebb tide’.
A hearty Sloane Ranger has ‘a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge’, while an older, fuller-figured lady in Company For Henry resembles ‘a Ziegfeld Follies girl who had been left out in the rain and had swollen a little’.
If you try to put these metaphors into the mouth of a character on stage they are likely to sound stilted, affected, too obviously descriptive.
The Goodale brothers hope to get round this by making the entire story a plot within a plot. The show will open with Bertie boasting he has hired the theatre to do a one-man show — his drinking friends having persuaded him he is such an ace raconteur he really deserves a bigger audience.
It soon becomes apparent that Ber- tie has insufficient reserves of intellect to carry off the task (no surprise there). And so the imperturbable Jeeves steps on from the wings, floating ‘from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas’ (to quote the original), advising his foolish master how to proceed. Jeeves ends up doing imitations of the various characters in Bertie’s story.
‘ The novels are written f rom Bertie’s viewpoint,’ says Goodale. ‘Using this plot device, we are able to make sure that the narrative still has that voice, with Bertie’s perception of the various characters.
‘Wodehouse himself tried to adapt The Code Of The Woosters for the stage but he struggled with it. He tried to do it as a drawing-room comedy. The concept of the one-man show at that time was not understood. We’re lucky that it now exists so we were able to plant it in Bertie’s brain.’
Wodehouse has been part of the Goodales’ lives for many years, says David. ‘Bobby had a twin brother called Andy and he was the first member of the family to get into Wodehouse. He and Bobby would walk round the house reciting extracts of the novels.’
Can Woosterville, if we can call it that, make sense to modern audiences?
This is a world inhabited by domineering aunts who bellow to one another like mastodons mooing across the swamp. It has squiffy members of the House of Lords, chaps called Bingo and Gussie, telegrams on hall tables and all-male clubs in London where the main occupation of members is buzzing buns at one another.
If that is not remote enough from 21st-century, egalitarianised, multicultural Britain, what about the simple production difficulties of transporting a theatre audience to some opulent English country house with a drawing room as big as a football pitch and a soupy girl called Madeline Bassett who likes talking about daisies and rabbits?
Some of the action in The Code Of The Woosters takes place in a London antique shop. ‘Like all antique shops,’ writes Wodehouse, this was ‘ dingy outside and dark and smelly within. I don’t know why it is, but the proprietors of these establishments always seem to be cooking some sort of stew in the back room.’ How will this work on stage in Perfect Nonsense?
What an unfashionable world it is, some might say. Where i s the suffering? The angst? The ‘relevance’ to post-Blair Britain? Others, mind you, might say: ‘Phew, what a relief – let’s just enjoy the comedy.’
Director Sean Foley says: ‘Wodehouse is a peerless comic stylist. You can not do it without that language. So about 90 per cent of the language we are using is real Wodehouse. The rest sounds like him.
‘But what the writers have produced is most definitely not a straight, country-house play. The story has a classic farce plot. Jeeves will impersonate characters and we are confident that we can attract a new audience to Wodehouse. We will not be preserving him in aspic.’
Foley says he i s aware t hat Wodehouse fans have firm views about how the work of The Master must or must not be dramatised. ‘Did you know that there is a Dutch branch of the Wodehouse Society?’ he says. ‘You are dealing wi t h people’s dreams. I hope we will not let them down.’
Not long after Wodehouse wrote The Code of the Woosters, his life was thrown into turmoil when (as a civilian) he was captured in France by the Germans at the start of World War II.
He was placed in detention and, during that time, agreed to do some whimsical radio broadcasts which were put out by Nazis.
Wodehouse was accused (surely harshly) of collaborating with the Hitler regime and although he was given a knighthood at the end of his life, he lived under a cloud for many years. I am proud to say that when the ‘Wodehouse treachery’ row was at its height, my grandfather had a letter printed in The Times defending the novelist’s name.
For how can anyone truly have thought Wodehouse a Nazi sympathiser? In Perfect Nonsense, as in The Code of the Woosters, there is an absurd character called Roderick Spode who is pretty clearly a send-up of the British fascist ‘Blackshirts’ leader of the time, Oswald Mosley (father, as it happens, of Max Mosley, the man who has led recent campaigns against the British press).
Spode is leader of ‘the Blackshorts’, so called because by the time he got
Soupy girls talk about daisies and rabbits
round to buying a uniform for his chaps the tailor had run out of black shirts.
It seems amazing that the Establishment fingerwaggers who attacked Wodehouse for his naive German radio broadcast did not take one look at Roderick Spode and understand that the novelist thought Hitler and Co were figures to be satirised rather than applauded.
‘Bertie is terrified of Spode and keeps going on about how tall he is,’ says Sean Foley. ‘He seems to think he is 9ft 7in. It so happens that Mark Hadfield, who will be playing Spode, is very short. We hope to have some fun with that.’
If the production can gnaw into Wodehouse’s view of officialdom, his delight in seeing authoritarians get their comeuppance, and his genial tolerance of love, lust and lushes, Perfect Nonsense could be on to something.
Along with the prose, it is the liberal decency of their creator, the truly great Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, that makes the novels so delightful.
Jeeves hardly ever criticises his chaotic, drunken employer. Bertie lives in terror of magistrates and aunts and sporty girls and creditors and many other predators, yet he is never powered by nihilism or anarchy or revenge. He bumbles through life, one eye cocked for trouble, the other for gaiety.
One of the moments of slapstick in The Code Of The Woosters involves an Aberdeen terrier. ‘It gave me an unpleasant look and said something under its breath in Gaelic,’ he says.
He was good on Aberdeen terriers. In his book Stiff Upper Lip he writes: ‘Aberdeen terriers, possibly owing to their heavy eyebrows, always seem to look at you as if they were in the pulpit of the church of some particularly strict Scottish sect and you were a parishioner of dubious reputation sitting in the front row of the stalls.’
Wonderful stuff. Let us hope that Messrs Mangan, Macfadyen and — dread word — collaborators can bring such magic to the West End stage.