Brian Rix and the Whitehall Farces

Abstract

Brian Rix greatly admired the Aldwych team idea of playwright, director and actors working together on a series of farces. It was his ambition to carry on that tradition in a West End theatre with his own company. He succeeded admirably, and indeed surpassed the Aldwych Theatre record of ten and a half years for one farce team in one theatre, in consecutive plays. His work there, however, was slow to win critical respect; indeed, throughout the sixteen years of the Whitehall farces, only a few critics, among them Harold Hobson, Ronald Bryden, J. W. Lambert and Alan Dent, could be found to take the farces and the company’s work on them seriously. More typical were such dismissive comments as, for Simple Spymen, ‘keeps simple audiences chuckling comfortably’,¹ for Dry Rot, ‘doubtless intended for an audience of donkeys’,² for Chase Me, Comrade! ‘a truly repulsive piece’.³