Word: farceur
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...fans to consider if his work is revelatory or predatory, and to ask, just a little, "Is he nuts?" Indeed, so fervid is the actor's belief in the cleansing power of confrontational comedy, so extreme is his commitment to the characters he plays - he's a Method farceur, a Daniel Day-Lewis with a sadistic sense of humor - that I wouldn't be surprised if Brüno did go backdoor with that guy, on camera. (The actor could tell his fiancée, actress Isla Fisher, that he was just being true to the process.) And I wonder...
...which, one hopes, will spark a fresh reappraisal of the work of the most misunderstood, and very likely best, playwright currently writing in English. That is far from a widespread view. In America, Ayckbourn is still typecast, anachronistically, as a lightweight boulevard farceur (the "British Neil Simon"), or simply as a clever deviser of staging gimmicks: plays that squeeze the action in several rooms into one space, or move backward in time, or fill up the stage with water, or (in his insanely ambitious Intimate Exchanges) have no fewer than 16 dramatic permutations, depending on which alternative action the characters...
...their aplomb unruffled. It also helps that screenwriter Dean Craig's inventions have a certain unstrained serenity in their development. It helps most of all that Oz, the sometime Sesame Street puppeteer (and, lest we forget, the man behind Yoda) is in charge. He's always been a terrific farceur (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, In and Out, Bowfinger) and he's at the top of his game here, a master at showing actors how to take the most appalling pratfalls while maintaining their deadpan dignity. If the movie errs, it is with an extended doo-doo joke that crosses over...
...Something similar might be said of the more aspiring Private Fears in Public Places, an unlikely adaptation by Alain Resnais, once the master of such high art revels as Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, of a play by Alan Ayckbourn, a farceur who has always loved, sometimes to excess, the intricate braiding of characters and story lines. Everything in this movie seems to have been made on a soundstage and, for reasons best known to the director, his Paris is caught in a perpetual blizzard; it goes on for the several days consumed by the plot...
...City” among many other famous comedic successes, has been delighting sold outcrowds since it opened this past weekend. The all-student cast manage to capture with inimitable wit the work of Ray Cooney, often regarded as the “greatest living English farceur.” Set in the illustrious Westminster Hotel, the play tells the story of what happens when junior minister of the British Parliament Mr. Richard Willey (Hugh Malone ’08) decides to participate in an illicit affair with the secretary of a member of the opposition party, Mrs. Jane Worthington (Tracy...