OUT OF ORDER
It’s no accident that two very funny farces currently running take place in hotel suites. Hotels are perfect settings for farce: even the classiest joints have an inescapable taint of naughtiness–hotels are where you go to do things you can’t do at home. And hotels have doors. Lots of doors, leading to all kinds of places, great for slamming, running in and out of, and hiding illicit lovers and dead bodies.
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But there’s more to farce than traffic management. Underneath the breathless action you’ve got to have stakes. Risk. Just as the only exciting roller coasters are the ones that make you think you might actually get killed any second, the best farces deal in deep and desperate psychic undercurrents–rarely openly expressed but suggested through such complications as mistaken identities, sex-role confusion, parent-child conflict, and the illusion of death. How well the comedy works depends on how well these elements are simultaneously denied and embraced–on the balance between escapist action and emotional need in the script and performances.
To avoid exposure, Willey calls upon his prissy secretary George Pigden to pose as Mrs. Worthington’s husband; the deception madly escalates as the suite is invaded by the real Mr. Worthington, Mrs. Willey, and the comely private nurse of Pigden’s bossy bedridden mother, all of whom are soon chasing each other through several doors and one unreliable window. Nobody actually does anything–no sex, please, they’re British–but it’s not for lack of trying. The final triumph goes to Pigden, who overcomes his mama’s-boy timidity to fix the mess his boss has created.
