It was on pain of death that I swore to director Lynne Parker not to reveal the several truly shocking turns of event in Dead Funny, Rough Magic's current production of Terry Johnson's acclaimed play. It would also be too bad if those of us who saw it in its recent previews and last night's opening were to ruin things for those who have not. Johnson himself lightly but firmly commented, when discussing certain key moments that create the twists and turns of the show, that he didn't think "they should be spoiled for people". And there is plenty that will surprise in a play in which one of the major threads seemingly focuses on the innocence of a certain brand of comedy.
Benny Hill is dead, and life, as Johnson's characters know it, stops short in remembrance. Everyone's life, that is, but Eleanor's - she is too concerned with trying to resurrect the expiring sex life she has with husband Richard. For Richard, as chairman of the Dead Funny Society, Hill's death gets him out of the bi-weekly sexual therapy session that Eleanor has instigated. The group, which includes the camp Brian and neighbours Nick and Lisa, gather not only to relive the high points of the comedian's life and work, but also to bond relentlessly in what is certainly a, shall we say, unique use of their time and energy, which includes re-enactments of the best-known skits of the music-hall era.
Serving as a contrast to the very real problems suffered by the play's characters is the rather ridiculous and tarty sexual humour associated with the Carry On films and with, of course, Benny Hill. The rapaciously vacuous Hill's Angels, those busty blondes in tiny clothing, were tagged as the aggressors in the sketches that featured them; the silliness of the images - the young "slappers" pursuing the harmless yet keen old man - belie the darkness of its subtext. "I think in terms of the way that men look at women, it's a kind of low-level pornography," says Parker, artistic director of Rough Magic, and director of the production. "The people who like Benny Hill would argue that it's really innocent, that he's always the victim, but (the play is) dealing with that childlike nature of male sexuality."
Notions of what's funny and what isn't have been a constant source of debate and investigation for philosophers and psychologists. Theories ranging from thinkers such as Aristotle through to Immanuel Kant, when boiled down, basically state that we laugh at jokes to make ourselves feel superior to the poor butt of the joke itself. Joking serves to keep society in line, by mocking and holding up for ridicule forms of behaviour that the group-at-large finds outlandish or out of line. Freud weighed in on the subject as well, positing that comedy as a device allowed the approach to taboo and untouchable subjects such as sex, private bodily functions, hostility and aggression. It is Dead Funny's particular strength that it manages to take on board all these theories, shake them up and give them back to the audience, all the while exploring the darkness inherent in human existence via the use of a comedic style that seems superficially harmless.
"It's a nostalgia for an innocent age when comedy was about hiding the filth, this sort of cheeky-chappie exterior," says Deborah Aydon, the producing director for the company. "It was always meant to be quite naughty, but you were always sniggering behind your hand, not laughing outright." This play was chosen "because of the quality of the writing," says Aydon. "Terry Johnson is a major playwright in the UK, but his work isn't known at all here, not by audiences in general. It's very much part of our mission to get major interesting work of the recent past into Ireland."
In person, Johnson seems very self-contained: he's not a serial joke-cracker, but subtly humorous, his well-modulated tones giving up the goods, as it were, bits and pieces. In Dublin on a flying visit to meet Parker and the show's cast, he says: "It's quite nice handing it over for revivals and just being a visitor. None of that dull repetition. But if I weren't getting on a plane today, this would go a couple of drafts because I can't resist writing for actors, and attempting to get the play fluid again every time I hit it."
His current theatrical foray is the West End production of The Graduate, which is about to go into its fourth cast. He says that the show will get a bit of tweaking and polishing: "You can always make a play better for the actors concerned if you write towards them. I tend to be quite proactive." Currently playing Mrs Robinson is Amanda Donohoe, although the role was quite spectacularly initiated by Hollywood star Kathleen Turner, and the cast is due for another change over in May. "We've got a little surprise up our sleeve," promises Johnson, looking like the cat who's got the cream.
The playwright directed Dead Funny's 1994 premiere in London's Hampstead Theatre, and continued to revise the show until a week before it closed. A British tour of the show followed, and it is from that success Johnson gets great satisfaction.
"The provincial theatre managers were terrified of it, and it took a lot of persuading to get it out on the road, because they were extremely worried about their audience. The glory was, the hate mail didn't come, the walk-outs never rose above twos or threes. The play helped change provincial theatre managers' perceptions in England of what the audience would accept, and what they actually wanted. They discovered that the audience would quite like a play with shagging in it, and nudity in it, and outrageousness in it. That discovery that there was a popular audience out there who'd actually grown up. I feel very proud of moving that forward."
Oops! Shagging? Nudity? Outrageousness? Has the play's punchline been telegraphed? Not quite. It's the quality of that shagging and nudity and outrageousness, more than its existence, that give Dead Funny its edge, and it's that quality about which I must keep shtum. "Terry has a brilliant sense of humour - very dark and very, very Jacobean," says Parker. "I think the play is about the human condition, and that's where it has the full 360-degree spectrum of the absurd and the ridiculous, and the painful and desperate."
According to Aydon: "The technical achievement of the play is that it's about comedy, and it's poking fun at the classic farce and TV comedy. But at the same time it's a beautifully constructed farce in the classic sense: in terms of the theatrical pace of it, the sort of hiding and revelation, but also the fact that it's so dark. There is a matter of life and death quality about it."
It certainly fulfils Freudian notions in regard to the use of jokes and comedy to mediate forbidden subjects, and also suits the Rough Magic idiom. Seventeen years on - believe it or not - the company is still pushing artistic boundaries for themselves, and expanding the perceptual boundaries of their audiences.
Johnson joins such previously produced playwrights as Harold Pinter, David Hare, Howard Barker, Caryl Churchill, Wallace Shawn and David Mamet. As Aydon says: "Dead Funny is perfect Rough Magic material, because it's entertaining, but it's also dark and thought-provoking and it's got something to say about the way that we live our lives.
"And it lends itself well to the sort of effervescent style of performance that the company is known for." The best of farcical theatre treads a very thin line between effervescent hilarity and the blackest of black humour. The necessary unity of the cruel and the comical is something that Johnson has down pat in Dead Funny, and its long-term success speaks to the play's ability to walk that very thin line with panache. "I remember knowing that I'd got a hit.
I think I'd written 20 minutes of the play when I worked out what might happen at the end of the second act. Then I knew the play was finished. Successful." He laughs. "Mind you, it has to be said, you feel that way about everything you write at some stage. This time I was right!"
Rough Magic's production of Dead Funny by Terry Johnson is playing in the Project's Space Upstairs until May 26th. Booking: 1850-260027