centres around Ralph Lynn accidentally being forced to spend the night at a country inn with an old flame (Yvonne Arnaud) after they both miss their train, hire a car together and become stuck in the rain. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

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. With a bit more pep, it could have been a classic, but just misses the mark despite some funny moments.

In 1970, BBC presented adaptations of six of the Aldwych series (and another Travers farce, She Follows Me About) with Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers in the Walls and Lynn roles. They are presented here as brand-new transfers from original film elements in their original aspect ratio. Beginning in 1930, they transferred to the screen and continued to be filmed through to the mid-30s, becoming a much-loved series. IO The "blowing off steam" - from Feydeau's La Dame de chez Maxim, through Travers's Rookery Nook, to Orton's What the Butler Saw, Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce and Stoppard'sDirtyLinen - usually involves real or suspected sexual misadventures, infidelity, adultery, or the confusion ofsexual roles.Some of the films do indeed suffer from this, and there are some rather long scenes that need a bit more pep, closer to the stodgy, theatrical style we tend to associate with 30s films. Two of the best farces (issued on Volume 2 of Network’s DVD series) featured other actors outside the main trio. Archive: "Tom Walls (1883 – 1949)" Archived 16 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine, British Pictures. The plays were presented by the actor-manager Tom Walls and starred Walls and Ralph Lynn, supported by a regular company that included Robertson Hare, Mary Brough, Winifred Shotter, Ethel Coleridge, and Gordon James. DIRTY WORK stands slightly apart from the other farces in that Tom Walls doesn’t appear , though he still directs.

Though only ten adaptations were made on film, the influence of these enduringly popular films was great and can be seen in some of the key British comedies from the first half of the 20th century.Nevertheless, farce exploits for its own humorous or subversive purposes a constant ofhuman nature: the conflict between the rational and the animal, civilized restraint and primitive impulse, authority and licence. As at 2013, the only other of the twelve to have been revived in the West End is Thark, in 1965 and 1989. 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. 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.

A newlywed husband is compelled through circumstances to spend the night sharing a room with an also-married lady friend. Of the three main principals, Robertson Hare had the most enduring career, appearing in partnership with Alfred Drayton and as a supporting actor. Lynn and Hulbert are both hopeless at holding down jobs but get mixed up in some dodgy shares that threaten to throw the family into disgrace.Farce releases inhibitions, offers a holiday from conventional morality, and permits both outrage and the triumph of the carnival spirit. England's cricket captain strives to keep his star batsman out of trouble during an Ashes series in Australia. The first in the Aldwych farce series was It Pays to Advertise, which ran for nearly 600 performances. The Aldwych Farces were a long-running series of comic plays written by playwright Ben Travers, and staged at the Aldwych Theatre by Tom Walls. definition as her starting-point and expands it herself, she does not seem to notice that the resulting description neglects the genre's capacities for serious import, subtlety, and laughter that repays analysis: "A dramatic work (usually short) which has for its sole object to excite laughter" (s.