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to be aware they are in a comedy. Of course they need a hell of a lot of energy and an ability to time the comedy. Also, in my plays the characters are speaking in ordinary everyday language – only very fast; there are no fancy monologues to hold on to, which means that you haven’t got time to enlarge on anything. And you have to deal with any given situation very quickly,which means having a split-second awareness. The audience doesn’t notice it, but the geography of the actors onstage is absolutely vital too. If you’ve got a funny line followed by an exit, it’s no good saying the line in the middle of the stage and then walking all the way to the door, so you have to devise ways and means of exiting that make an impact and build the laugh. It’s technical stuff, but it works.
And of course the actors need a heck of a lot of energy to get through a performance.
    Yes, but laughter is energising in itself. Gales of laughter coming across the footlights is addictive in some way. It’s a wonderful feeling when you get that. It’s a pleasure to go to the theatre every evening. As a writer and director sitting at the back of the auditorium, to be in a theatre full of people laughing at what you have taken great pains to create is a fantastic feeling. It’s the same for the actors. It’s incredibly fulfilling when they hear those eruptions of laughter.
Are there rules for directing farce?
    There probably are but I don’t follow them myself except for telling the actors to relate to each other onstage truthfully. Farce might be fun to watch, but creating fun is a serious business. Actors that work withme know that my own little shortcut for describing how to play farce is ‘eyebrows up’. I don’t know where I got it from, but it’s impossible to say an unpleasant line when you are ‘eyebrows up’. If you say, ‘I hate you, please get out of the house’ with your eyebrows up you can’t go wrong. There’s something intrinsically funny about ‘eyebrows up’. Which is probably why I have so many lines on my forehead. Try it!
Do you prefer writing by yourself or with a partner as you did with John Chapman on Not Now Darling, There Goes the Bride and Move Over Mrs Markham ?
    Most comedy writing partnerships are sitcom or gag writers. There aren’t too many who sit down and write farces together. With John it was a wonderful partnership. In something like 40 years we never had a cross word. Our partnership began when I had an idea for a farce after reading a short newspaper article about a man in Norway taking a lady to court over a mink coat he had given her. I made lots of notes and had just started to plot it out when John phoned out of the blue. He was writing the Hugh and I television series, starring Hugh Lloyd and Terry Scott, and was up to his eyes in it with another seven episodes to go, so he asked me if I would like to help him out. I agreed to co-write with John but, in return, asked him to read my new minkcoat script. He liked it, worked on it with me, and that’s how Not Now Darling was created.
    We used to sit opposite sides of a table and act out the dialogue, much as I do now when I am writing on my own – I still get totally lost in the world of the characters as I write. John and I wrote four plays together and the only reason we stopped was because he liked writing for television, so he segued down that path and I carried on in theatre.
Sounds like it was a thoroughly enjoyable collaboration.
    Well, everything in my work and my life has been fun. I never get up in the morning without thinking how lucky I am to be doing what I do.
Compared with the naughty French, British farces seem to be rather more innocent – sex comedy without the sex maybe. Are you consciously careful to avoid being too explicit?
    When I first started writing we were always aware of the Lord Chamberlain’s blue pencil. You were only