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Aldwych Farces Vol. 1 [DVD]

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The last of them, A Bit of a Test in 1933, ran for 142 performances, compared with runs of more than 400 performances for some of the earlier productions. The Aldwych Farces were a long-running series of comic plays written by playwright Ben Travers, and staged at the Aldwych Theatre by Tom Walls. The comic break-in scenes are excellent and this turns into maybe the funniest of all the films on the two discs. As Freud pointed out in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1904), the fantasies ofhumour, heedless of taboos, channel underlying, more primitive impulses to express themselves in , ways forbidden by the conscious mind. When two gentlemen try their best to be chivalrous, they find themselves caught on the sticky end of a series of unfortunate misunderstandings.

Cuckoo in the Nest is an early version of the 1954 'Fast and Loose' (Stanley Holloway, Kay Kendal and other worthies). Heilman make these astonishing assertions in their drama textbook: "the situations in farce do not mean anything: . The farces were very much a pre-war construct, and the troubled times made them seem a bit too inconsequential. Two classic farces from the golden era of Aldwych, "A Cuckoo in the Nest" one of the most famous of the series, displaying the talents of Ralph Lynn, Tom Walls and Robertson Hare to particularly splendid advantage. If you are in the North America, look out for US/Canadian flag icons on popular product listings for direct links.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, a similar hit series of farces began at the Whitehall Theatre and came to be known as Whitehall farces. A newlywed man gives shelter to a damsel in distress in his wife's absence, and has to head off scandal stirred up by his interfering sister-in-law. Lynn carries much of the comedy scenes, sneaking in and out to avoid the landlady, struggling to bed down on the floor, retrieving a dog in the rain, or rehearsing his excuses.Walls secured a cheap, long-term lease on the theatre, which had fallen so far out of fashion with playgoers that it had been used as a YMCA hostel during the First World War.

They are presented here as brand-new transfers from original film elements in their original aspect ratio. Lynn's younger brother Hastings Lynn, played his brother's roles in successful productions in Australia and New Zealand. Walls and Lynn would each make solo films as well, but their careers began to wind down in the late ’30s. The Aldwych farces also featured a regular team of supporting actors: Robertson Hare as a figure of put-upon respectability; Mary Brough in eccentric old lady roles; Ethel Coleridge as the severe voice of authority; the saturnine Gordon James as the "heavy"; and first Yvonne Arnaud, then Winifred Shotter, as the sprightly young female lead.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Ideal foils were provided by monocled silly-ass Ralph Lynn, and bald, timid, bird-like Robertson Hare, who inevitably found himself mixed up in the middle of things, wailing “Oh Calamity! This particular release has been discontinued, however you may still be able to find second-hand copies. In the early days, he also had reservations about the other star of the company, Ralph Lynn, who initially ad-libbed too much for the author's taste. Travers noted that the ad-libbing diminished as he came to anticipate and include in his scripts "the sort of thing Ralph himself would have said in the circumstances".

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