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by Wade Hollingshaus, Dramaturg

In 1965, while John Osborne and other members of the so-called Angry Young Man movement were busy at the Royal Court Theatre writing and producing serious plays packed with sociopolitical turmoil, a short three kilometers to the northeast another British playwright, Peter Shaffer, was generating one of the funniest plays ever put on the boards: Black Comedy.

Early in 1965, the National Theatre in London had been planning a production of August Stringberg’s Miss Julie and decided that one way to contain the extreme pathos of that heavy tragedy would be to make it part of a double-bill, to follow it with a short comedy. But what to pair with it?

In a discussion with Kenneth Tynan, who was the National’s dramaturg at the time, Peter Shaffer described a Peking Opera performance he had recently seen and which he thought would translate quite well into a contemporary comedy. In the performance, two Chinese swordsmen encounter each other one night in a pitch-dark inn and, even though they cannot see each other at all, proceed to engage in a sword fight. The convention here that Shaffer was so struck by was that while the characters on the stage are trapped in darkness—with the actors feigning blindness—the stage is actually fully lit, allowing the audience to see everything and enjoy a hilarious series of near misses.

Shaffer:

Ever one to appreciate a theatrical idea, Tynan dragged me off instantly to see Laurence Olivier, the director of the National. In vain did I protest that there really was no play, merely a convention, and that anyway I had to travel immediately to New York to write a film script. Olivier simply looked through me with his own Chinese and unseeing eyes, said, “It’s all going to be thrilling!” and left the room.

With a green light from Olivier, Shaffer had less than a month to write the first draft of Black Comedy. After arriving in New York, he learned that every word he had written would essentially be scrapped, and during a ten-day break in his schedule, he wrote a second draft. Then, upon returning to London, he rewrote yet again the entire second half of the play. Of course by this point tickets to the play that had yet to be completely written were almost sold out, and even during those oh-so-crucial final days of rehearsal, Shaffer continued to turn out new and revised pages. Olivier summed up well the entire enterprise when he declared, “This is farce written under farce conditions.”

Indeed, this was farce written under farce conditions. But even if we put aside the rapid rewriting that led to that first production of Black Comedy, we could see that in 1965, London itself was inundated by “farce conditions.” This was the middle of the Cold War, which threatened to repeat Hiroshima and Nagasaki anywhere and to a much more severe degree. The very idea that humanity had reached a point where it would actually entertain the possibility of destroying itself left many wondering about the absurdity of life. Moreover, two years earlier, Londoners were knocked on their heels when one of the key members in Britain’s Conservative parliament had been caught having an affair with a call girl that was linked to a Russian spy (“The Profumo Affair”).

To be sure, many Londoners were dissatisfied with “the Establishment.” Their response? To create something new—but not just another world to replace the existing one. Instead, they became engaged in a never-ending process of world-making, a new world every moment. This new attitude was the very ethos of what became known as “Swinging London,” marked by colorful and outlandish fashions, free-spirited sexuality—remember What’s New Pussycat?—and hundreds of young people wondering where “the action” is, looking for “what’s happening,” and trying to “make the scene.” These youth were convinced that the world is not unmalleable. For them, the world is a collection of materials for invention, materials to be used to “make the scene,” whether it be through sculpture—like our Brindsley—or through language—like our dear Carol, with her “sexipoos” and “gaudipoos”—or through fashion, music, protest, or even, on the best of days, farce.