Neil Simon's last laugh

Neil Simon is one of the great playwrights of our time, so he’s allowed be a little curmudgeonly while talking about his favourite actors, creating comedy by accident, and the last play he’ll ever write

‘THIS is either going to be very long or very short,” Neil Simon declares into the phone. “I’m 83 now.” His New York accent spices up his vowels: loh-wong, shaw-wort. But there’s no denying it: the comic genius and one of the most successful playwrights ever to grace stage and screen is less than thrilled by my call.

Before he picked up the receiver I could hear a muffled female voice tell him, perhaps in an attempt at persuasion, "all the way from Ireland". Now he's reminding me that he wrote the play Plaza Suitea loh-wong, loh-wong time ago. "Nineteen sixty-eight or something like that." Well, does he have 10 minutes to talk anyhow? "I've got 10 minutes," he says, in a tone that is both amiable and suggests he can think of much better ways to spend it.

Rough Magic’s new production of Simon’s classic comedy opens at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire next week. Set in the eponymous Manhattan hotel overlooking Central Park, each of the play’s three acts features a different couple whose life has brought them to suite 719.

The first pair are revisiting the scene of their honeymoon in an attempt, instigated by the wife, to rekindle their marriage. The second act sees a movie producer meet up with an old flame, with nefarious purposes in mind. In the final, and funniest, act, a husband and wife try to talk their daughter out of the bathroom, where she has locked herself in a fit of nerves ahead of her wedding.

“I lived near the Plaza Hotel, and I used to work up there. I’d go there because my wife was taking care of our babies a few blocks away, so I had a place I liked to work. And I loved George C Scott. So I said, ‘Waaaaay, I got George C Scott in a play,’ ” he says, referring to the actor who appeared in the original Broadway production.

Plaza Suitewas an immediate success, running for a whopping 1,097 performances in the spring of 1968 and winning Simon a Tony Awards nomination, though he was pipped at the post by Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.For the first production Scott and Maureen Stapleton played all three couples. Is that Simon's favourite way to produce the piece? "Yes – and it's very important for the actors," he says. "George C Scott was very happy to play three parts, and so was Maureen. It was a new thing for them, and you rarely see it. Somebody's doing it this year with Woody Allen and two other people. That's gonna come up this year. But doing it this way was very interesting to me."

The Rough Magic production will take a different approach. Three directors whose careers have been developed by the company’s Seeds programme for young theatre practitioners, Aoife Spillane-Hinks, Sophie Motley and Matt Torney, will each direct one of the acts. What does Simon think of that?

“Well, it’s fine, because I don’t know who the directors are. So I have nothing to say about it. I’m just trusting you and the group,” he says. They’re a good theatre company, I volunteer. “Yeah – and I love Ireland. I’ve been there twice, with my first wife and then my second wife. Yeah. I loved Ireland.”

At this point I remind myself that the ebullient octogenarian on the line is a living legend. An essay in the Paris Reviewputs it this way: "By any measure – quantity, quality, popular success, renown – Neil Simon is the pre-eminent purveyor of comedy in the last half of the 20th century. Like the work of most writers of comedy, from Aristophanes to Woody Allen, Simon's humour is written to be spoken. And heard . . . Simon is not only skillful at his craft but prolific as well. He is the author of more than 20 plays, including Come Blow Your Horn, Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, the Brighton Beach trilogy, Prisoner of Second Avenue, Plaza Suite, and Lost in Yonkers." Simon won a Pulitzer Prize for the latter, and his biog bristles with awards of all kinds.

Does he know how many of his plays are on in the world right now? “How many of what?” he asks. “Oh. Yeah. My wife is yelling – everywhere. Everywhere, in every city.” Does he go to see them at all? “No. No, because it’s too far and I’m too old. But I’m just writing one, probably last, play. But don’t ask me what it’s gonna be about, because I don’t know yet.”

I don't ask. Instead I ask about his relationship with Walter Matthau, who appeared in the film versions of many of his plays, most famously with Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple. In 2000 Simon wrote a sequel, Hanging It Up, which Diane Keaton directed and which was Matthau's final appearance on screen. "He was the funniest and best actor," says Simon. "Aside from Jack Lemmon. I loved to work with those guys. Both of them."

I've read that when he wrote The Odd Couple, Simon reckoned its subject matter – neurotic newswriter moves in with sloppy sportswriter friend when his wife throws him out – was too bleak to make it really popular.

“Well, you never know what’s gonna be popular,” he says. “You don’t know until you get it in front of people.” He says something I don’t catch. Sorry, I say. There’s silence on the line for a beat. Then he asks, “Pardon me?” Was he going to say something? “No. I was just looking at you,” comes the innocent reply.

Would Simon agree that comedy has changed considerably since he wrote his first play, in 1960? “Everything changes when you get older, no matter where you start,” he says. “So I don’t try to write about today, because I don’t know about today. But the last play, I think I’m just going to write about my family from the beginning to the end. It’s tough to do it, but I think I’m going to try.”

Will this play be a comedy, I ask. He laughs. “I don’t know until I write it. You see, I never think I’m writing comedy when I start off. I’d rather write about living. What people get into, and the things they get away with. Or work with. I just write, and I turn to the next page and write, and I say, ‘Okay, this is the way it’s going to go now.’

“They’ll say to me, ‘How do you write a play?’ And I’ll say, ‘You get up in the morning with a pen and pencil and that’s it.’ I just get up in the morning and . . .” The end of the sentence fizzles out into static. See what’s going to come to him that day, I suggest. “Right. That’s how it goes.”

Does he have anything else he’d like to say? “If I did,” he answers, smart as a whip, “I’d have said it already.”

Plaza Suiteis at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, from July 13th-30th

The hotel worthy of its own star on Hollywood Boulevard

The Plaza Hotel is one of those iconic New York backdrops that turns up regularly both on the small screen and at the cinema. Built in the style of a Renaissance French chateau, it opened in 1907 and made its first major movie appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller North by Northwestin 1959.

By the time the play Plaza Suitewas set there, the hotel had already featured in Barefoot in the Park– which had a screenplay by Neil Simon — and the Barbra Streisand musical Funny Girl. Love at First Bite, Cotton Club, Arthur, the two Crocodile Dundees, King of New Yorkand Scent of a Womanare just some of the films to have shot scenes in and around the Plaza.

So did Sleepless in Seattle— and, famously, Home Alone 2, whose young protagonist eluded hotel staff by sliding through the lobby into a waiting elevator. In the 2008 rom com Bride Wars, Anne Hathaway spends a good deal of her time scooting through the hotel's salubrious interiors.

Between shoots, people do stay there as well. At the moment you can book yourself a romantic getaway, complete with champagne, for a mere $965 dollars a night. A word of warning, though: If you're hoping to rekindle your marriage, check out the first act of Simon's Plaza Suitefirst. Happy endings are hard to find.