Aldwych Farces Vol. 1 [DVD]

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A newlywed husband is compelled through circumstances to spend the night sharing a room with an also-married lady friend. This ongoing range will include not only the Aldwych Farces themselves but those films that they influenced.

If you are in Australia or New Zealand (DVD Region 4), note that almost all DVDs distributed in the UK by the BBC and 2entertain are encoded for both Region 2 and Region 4. After five years of extraordinary success, Walls' business partnership with Henson ended in September 1927 during the run of Thark, and from October, the Aldwych farces were presented by the firm of Tom Walls and Reginald Highley Ltd. The last of them, A Bit of a Test in 1933, ran for 142 performances, compared with runs of more than 400 performances for some of the earlier productions. The Aldwych farces of the 1920s and 1930s provide a classic example of a fruitful collaboration between a playwright — Ben Travers — and a team of actors, headed by Ralph Lynn, Robertson Hare and Tom Walls, who managed and directed the company.Of the three main principals, Robertson Hare had the most enduring career, appearing in partnership with Alfred Drayton and as a supporting actor. In 1952, three years after Walls's death, Lynn and Hare starred at the Aldwych in a new Travers farce, Wild Horses. It’s a modern day Romeo and Juliet story in suburbia: neighbours, the pompous Walls and uptight Hare constantly do battle, while Ralph Lynn and Dorothy Hyson are their star-crossed offspring.

Lynn carries much of the comedy scenes, sneaking in and out to avoid the landlady, struggling to bed down on the floor, retrieving a dog in the rain, or rehearsing his excuses. Tom Walls directed the films, and has been accused of directing the actors in a stage play and then pointing the camera at them. Farce releases inhibitions, offers a holiday from conventional morality, and permits both outrage and the triumph of the carnival spirit. My discussion of these farces will focus on three in particular, Rookery Nook (1926), Thark (1927) and Plunder (1928), as representative of Travers’s work at its best and most characteristic, and on the three leading members of the company already referred to, who seemed especially to stimulate the dramatist’s inventive flair. Walls and Lynn would each make solo films as well, but their careers began to wind down in the late ’30s.The plays generally revolved around a series of preposterous incidents involving a misunderstanding, borrowed clothes and lost trousers, involving the worldly Walls character, the innocent yet cheeky Lynn, the hapless Hare, the beefy, domineering Brough, the lean, domineering Coleridge, and the pretty and slightly spicy Shotter, all played with earnest seriousness. Most of the Aldwych farces were adapted for film in the 1930s, starring the original stage casts as far as possible. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.