Seriously funny ... Kristin Scott Thomas (Arkadina) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Trigorin) in Chekhov's The Seagull
Here's a question. At what point did comedy become king: the be-all and end-all of virtually all theatrical entertainment? I've lost track of the number of interviews I've read with directors and actors who tell us that they are going to defy the gloom-mongers and bring out the "comedy" in Chekhov or Beckett or Pinter. With the last, the disastrous results can currently be seen in Pinter's People where a team of comics, led by Bill Bailey, kill just about every joke in Pinter's revue-sketches.
Of course, people have always gone to theatre in search of a laugh: even the Greeks famously rounded off their tragic trilogies with a satyr-play which presumably sent audiences out smiling. But, in our own culture, something strange has happened. We have institutionalised comedy, treating it as the one god we can all worship. The Edinburgh Fringe is notoriously dominated by comedy: the result is that stand-ups, who might be funny in ten-minute bursts, laboriously stretch their material to 50 minutes in search of elusive prizes. Festivals of comedy - a nightmarish prospect - are, I'm told, held in Canada. And every TV company has its Head of Comedy who presumably presides over Stakhanovite gag-factories. But all this misses the real point. True comedy stems from an outlook on life and often emerges through the interstices of tragedy.
Three current shows prove my point. The funniest, by far, is Chekhov's The Seagull at the Royal Court. And this is because the director, Ian Rickson, realises that Chekhov's comedy is inseparable from his tragic vision. You see this in the opening moments when Medvedenko can't even get out his famous first line - "Why do you always wear black?" - because his future wife, Masha, is too busy swooping on Konstantin's discarded scribbles. It is funny precisely because it is painful. The same is true of Beckett's Happy Days at the National where Fiona Shaw's Winnie, even when buried up to her neck in earth, can't resist making a joke about her husband's sexual inadequacy and lack of learning.
In both Chekhov and Beckett the laughter stems from an awareness of the rich absurdity of human existence. And the same applies to Pinter. Knowing the man a bit, as I do, I'd say that his love of what the Irish call good "craic" is accompanied by a profound sense of life's darkness and solitude. But the point seems totally lost on the gang who've put together Pinter's People.
They start from the assumption that Pinter's sketches are meant to be an unending laugh-riot and pull funny faces, do funny walks and semaphore their supposed sense of humour. The result makes one's spirits sink; and one can only trust that the shrewdly intelligent Lee Evans, about to appear in The Dumb Waiter, doesn't make the same mistake. I would class Pinter among the great comic writers of our time. The real trick, however, is to play him straight and not to batter us in to submission like the loons at the Haymarket. As in life, no one is less funny than people who think they're a scream: in the end, you can't have real comedy without a sense of sadness.
