One Man, Two Guvnors duo on reuniting for wartime comedy Jack Absolute Flies Again

Twenty minutes into my conversation with Richard Bean and Oliver Chris about their new comedy, we are having an in-depth discussion about a wooden duck.

The duck makes its stage debut at London’s National Theatre this week in Jack Absolute Flies Again and plays a pivotal role. This is surprising given that the play is based on Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, the comedy of manners gem that launched the word-mangling phenomenon Mrs Malaprop on the world — a work better known for wigs and wit than for waterfowl.

But then Bean (as playwright) and Chris (as actor) were responsible for the divine lunacy that was One Man, Two Guvnors, a wildly successful take on Goldoni’s 18th-century commedia dell’arte The Servant of Two Masters.

“The duck becomes the representation of love in the whole show,” says Chris, when I speak to the pair on Zoom. Bean is at home in Worcestershire, Chris is at the National Theatre, where he is in rehearsals — an experience, which, as actor-turned-writer, he is finding very strange: “It’s so hard not to get up on the stage.”

Chris played posh twit Stanley Stubbers (one of the “two guvnors”) in Bean’s runaway comedy hit and has acted in several of the playwright’s dramas. It was during a long car journey that the pair began riffing on The Rivals — “Oli’s ideas were significantly better than mine,” recalls Bean — and before long they were collaborating on a script designed to honour the splendid silliness of the original, but also give it a new lease of life.

In the new version, Mrs Malaprop (played by comic actor Caroline Quentin) remains in all her lexicographical glory, but instead of Georgian-era Bath, she appears in deepest Sussex, mid Battle of Britain, where her stately home has been requisitioned by the RAF. Her unique relationship with the English language plays out among joysticks and engine oil.

“An English lady’s garden should be an oasis of peace and quiet medication,” she opines, imperiously, as planes roar overhead.

The plot shadows Sheridan closely: two sets of giddy young lovers get themselves in a frightful twist, with dashing Jack Absolute ending up disguised as his own impoverished rival. But whereas it’s an excess of romantic fiction that drives the original Lydia Languish to become besotted with the idea of poverty, here she is an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot with a taste for women’s liberation.

“I was always tickled to bits by Lydia Languish wanting to marry a poor working-class bloke when she’s posh,” says Bean. “I felt that if we get the setting right and make it a bit more modern and racy, it could really take off. And the Battle of Britain is a fabulous setting for it.”

The new play meets Sheridan’s relish for language with linguistic flourish of its own, splicing quick-fire repartee with the clipped enunciation of wartime newsreels and fruity barrack-room banter. But, more importantly, the setting brings a jeopardy and poignancy to the comedy that is absent from the original. Here the characters are living on the edge, with death a possibility at any moment.

“If you’re a 22-year-old who’s never known a woman and you’re going up in the sky five times a day, possibly to die, that puts some urgency to live in your step,” says Chris. “I feel there is a possibility within our play to make people both laugh and cry. This is not One Man, Two Guvnors: it has elements of farce but it’s Restoration comedy, and that is a different beast to commedia dell’arte. So whilst we hope it will be a Technicolor explosion of joy in many ways, it’s not just a fluffy laugh factory.”

“There is a dark side to this play,” agrees Bean. “It’s like Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost at the end. All the lovers get off with each other but then war kicks back in.”

Bean and Chris bring considerable comedy chops to their collaboration. Chris was most recently on stage as Oberon in the Bridge Theatre’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream and played a very droll, lovelorn Orsino in the National’s 2017 Twelfth Night.

Bean, meanwhile, despite his somewhat saturnine demeanour, has an ability to coin laugh-out-loud lines and enjoys strolling into enemy fire while whistling: he has written comedies about climate change (The Heretic), immigration (England People Very Nice) and terrorism (The Big Fellah) and bats away the suggestion that some issues might not be a laughing matter. “It’s a tool, isn’t it? You’ve just got to show hypocrisy wherever it lies.”

Comedy, he says, can be every bit as effective as straight drama at dealing with dark, difficult or moving subjects. “They’re two different skills. It’s like plumbing and being an electrician. Tragedians and state-of-the-nation playwrights approach the work differently from comedians.”

Which brings us to the duck. As a token of affection between two of the characters, this humble prop becomes a running gag — until the end when its appearance is suddenly charged with meaning. “That’s a bit that always gets me,” says Chris. “There is this quiet moment of togetherness symbolised by the most preposterous artefact. It is very emotional.”

Yet when Bean first suggested the duck’s inclusion, Chris was sceptical.

“I sat there thinking, ‘This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. How do I tell him?’ Then I slept on it and began to subsume the idea. And gradually over the drafts the role of the duck just grew and grew . . . and now it’s my favourite thing. It’s wonderful how the creative process can work like that.”

When the play opens in the National’s Olivier theatre next week it will follow two major productions — Small Island and The Father and the Assassin — that used the huge arena to look back at Britain’s role in a changing world mid-20th century. In its own way, Jack Absolute does something similar, which is why Bean and Chris chose the Olivier over the proscenium-arched Lyttelton. The Olivier, says Bean, gives you a “big national metaphor” — and allows the aerial dogfights to become spectacular.

“Yes OK, it’s a silly comedy,” says Bean. “But it is about an existential crisis that this nation faced . . . ”

“Listen to that!” enthuses Chris. “You should write plays.”

“I’m going to give it a go,” says Bean.

From July 2, nationaltheatre.org.uk; and to be broadcast on NTLive on October 6, ntlive.com

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