John Cleese on Monty Python, Terry Jones and his love of farce

John Mortimer once observed that “farce is tragedy played at a thousand revolutions per minute”.
John Cleese who has made his stage-writing debut.John Cleese who has made his stage-writing debut.
John Cleese who has made his stage-writing debut.

Mortimer, the man who created that wonderful curmudgeon Horace Rumpole, knew a thing or two about comedy and so, too, does John Cleese. In a career spanning more than 50 years, Cleese has established himself as one of Britain’s greatest comic writers and performers – first as part of the fabled Monty Python team and then in Fawlty Towers, which he co-wrote with Connie Booth, as well as through films such as Clockwise and A Fish Called Wanda.

Now, at the age of 80, he’s made his stage-writing debut with Bang Bang!, based on a classic French farce written by Georges Feydeau, starring Tessa Peake-Jones and Wendi Peters.

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It comes to York’s Theatre Royal next month, a venue Cleese says he’s hugely fond of. “It’s a great theatre and the perfect size for me. It’s the kind of theatre I’d like to play all the time.”

The Monty Python team, seen here in 2014. (PA).The Monty Python team, seen here in 2014. (PA).
The Monty Python team, seen here in 2014. (PA).

Writing a comedy for the stage has, he says, been a long-held ambition. “My career started on the stage but that was in revues and sketches... I’ve always had a special respect for people like Michael Frayn and Alan Ayckbourn and Alan Bennett, of course, who have written some really wonderful plays.”

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It sparked an interest in farce and in particular the work of Georges Feydeau. “He came up with plots that were not only funny but exquisitely constructed, they were so clever and logical and yet they were also full of twists you hadn’t seen coming. So it felt very intellectually satisfying, as though it had been written by a mathematician, but at the same time it was terribly funny,” he says.

“I love the construction of a 90-minute piece, and if you get it right in the cinema that’s very satisfying. But there’s something very special about sitting in a theatre with six or seven people on stage making you howl with laughter."

Daniel Burke and Tony Gardner in Cleese's new farce Bang Bang! PAUL BLAKEMORE.Daniel Burke and Tony Gardner in Cleese's new farce Bang Bang! PAUL BLAKEMORE.
Daniel Burke and Tony Gardner in Cleese's new farce Bang Bang! PAUL BLAKEMORE.
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Cleese feels the stage lends itself better to farce than the small screen. “What’s so great about farce in the theatre is it’s very visual and you can see everyone at the same time. You can’t do that on television because you have to push in for close-ups and so on.”

Is there a secret to a good farce? “I think the key elements are the structure of the plot and if I was to give advice to young people who are interested in farce, what I would say is get the story right – before you start writing the dialogue. When Connie and I were writing Fawlty Towers, we didn’t write any lines of dialogue for about two-and-a-half weeks. We just tried to figure out what made the plot work. A lot of writers almost come up with a straight plot and then they have to write lots of jokes, because the situation is not very funny – but if you can write funny situations, then writing the dialogue is easy because you just have to act out that situation.”

Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare. His mother Muriel was an acrobat, and his father, Reginald, who had changed his surname from “Cheese” in 1915, was in insurance sales. His love of comedy was evident from an early age. As a 6ft 13-year-old, Cleese is said to have painted footsteps to suggest that the school’s statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth to go to the loo. Then came an epiphany. “I went to see a couple of plays at the Old Vic in Bristol, and one of them was a comedy called One Way Pendulum by a fella called NF Simpson and I didn’t know that kind of comedy existed and somehow it lit something in me that had never been lit before.”

Cleese met Graham Chapman at Cambridge, where they were stars of the Footlights. A revue took them from the Edinburgh Fringe to Broadway. While in the US, Cleese met Terry Gilliam and Connie Booth.

John Cleese has written his first stage play, which is coming to York in April. (Getty Images).John Cleese has written his first stage play, which is coming to York in April. (Getty Images).
John Cleese has written his first stage play, which is coming to York in April. (Getty Images).
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Back in Britain, he was hired to write for The Dick Emery Show. Then he and Chapman joined the team of The Frost Report, which already had among its talent Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones. From there, they moved to At Last the 1948 Show, before the five future Pythons coalesced on Do Not Adjust Your Set.

We know the rest, except that an unsung hero in the success of Monty Python was BBC head of light entertainment Michael Mills, who followed his gut instinct to commission the first series of 13 shows. “I think Python’s humour was very original,” says Cleese. “When people saw it for the first time their reaction, by and large, was ‘I haven’t seen anything like this before’. There’d been The Goon Show and a couple of other shows, but in America, in particular, they hadn’t seen that kind of comedy and suddenly they were exposed to a world they didn’t know existed.”

Monty Python, unlike Fawlty Towers, revolved around sketches. “The Holy Grail was a lot of sketches stitched together, whereas Life of Brian was a perfectly good plot, and wasn’t just silly.”

The popularity of Python hasn’t waned over time, if anything it has grown – when tickets for their reunion stage tour went on sale in 2013 the first four shows sold out in just 55 minutes.

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Cleese finds its longevity gratifying, but puzzling. “I still don’t understand it. The great luck we had, without realising what we were doing, was that both The Holy Grail and Life of Brian were set in historical periods and that means by definition they can’t date, and I think that’s why they hold up so well.”

Following Terry Jones’ death, there are now just four surviving members of the team, and Cleese is fulsome in his praise of his old chum. “He used to come up with wonderful visual ideas. He came up with the joke that was so funny that if anyone heard it they laughed themselves to death, and he came up with the fat man who ate so much he exploded. He was always coming up with these big visual ideas.

“I think the greatest thing he ever did was to direct Life of Brian. I don’t think anyone on earth could have directed it better than he did. It was our best and I think our most important film.”

Talking to Cleese, you sense the drive and enthusiasm of a man half his age, and a glance at his Twitter posts reveals someone who won’t go gently into that good night. “There’s still masses of things I want to do,” he says.

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Underpinning it all is his insatiable thirst for comedy. “I love writing and making jokes, it’s what makes me happy. I once said, it’s much easier to be clever than it is to be really funny. So I always try to be as funny as I can.”

Bang Bang! runs at York Theatre Royal from April 28 to May 2. yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

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