{"id":4435,"date":"2026-04-02T14:01:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T14:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/4435\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T14:01:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T14:01:24","slug":"ray-cooney-is-britains-greatest-farceur-but-dementia-means-he-doesnt-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/4435\/","title":{"rendered":"Ray Cooney is Britain\u2019s greatest farceur, but dementia means he doesn\u2019t know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linda met Cooney in the late 1950s at a party arranged by the actor Andrew Sachs. \u201cWe were both with other people at the time,\u201d she says mischievously. She starred in One for the Pot, and remembers seeing a young Prince Charles and Princess Anne in the audience, \u201cgoing backwards and forwards in their chairs, they were laughing so much\u201d. She retired from acting when her two children were born (a second son, Danny, lives in Australia) and turned to painting, but has always found herself involved in her husband\u2019s career.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always done what he\u2019s wanted me to do,\u201d she says. \u201cThere aren\u2019t many wives like that around anymore.\u201d What sort of things? \u201cWhen he bought the Shaftesbury Theatre [with his company, The Theatre of Comedy, in 1983] he said, \u2018Oh and we\u2019ll have a caf\u00e9. Linda will run it.\u2019 And suddenly there I was, making macaroni cheese. Or he would say, \u2018Oh, Peter [O\u2019Toole<\/a>, who starred in Cooney\u2019s revival of Pygmalion in 1984] wants his dressing room done out in red.\u2019 So I\u2019d spend a Sunday hanging curtains and laying a pink carpet for Peter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cooney wasn\u2019t simply a playwright, he was an impresario, producing and directing plays and, when an actor was on holiday, starring in them, too. Initially working with the actor-manager Brian Rix<\/a>, who starred in many of his early comedies, he became synonymous with the genre throughout the 1960s, Seventies and Eighties, and was so admired by the French, they called him Le Feydeau Anglais, equating him to their own celebrated farceur, Georges Feydeau.<\/p>\n

Cooney was an idealist, deciding when he set up The Theatre of Comedy Company that all profits should be shared equally, right down to the box-office staff. \u201cWhich worked fine with a play like Run for Your Wife, which did very well, but not when a play didn\u2019t,\u201d says Linda drily.<\/p>\n

Yet, at the same time, his instincts were unapologetically commercial. \u201cHis only objective was to make an audience laugh,\u201d says Michael, whose own farce, 1997\u2019s Cash on Delivery, about a benefits scammer, is currently being revived at the Mill at Sonning, Berkshire. (The Mill has a long association with the Cooney family, regularly reviving Ray\u2019s plays, and has renamed their auditorium in his honour.) \u201cHe was never interested in experimentation. It was only ever about bums on seats.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Linda met Cooney in the late 1950s at a party arranged by the actor Andrew Sachs. \u201cWe were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2590,2588,13,2586,2587,956,2112,2585,2589,2591,330,387,333],"class_list":{"0":"post-4435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-aged-care","9":"tag-alzheimers-disease","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-claire-allfree","12":"tag-comedy","13":"tag-culture","14":"tag-culture-editors-choice","15":"tag-dementia","16":"tag-elder-health","17":"tag-jokes","18":"tag-standard","19":"tag-theatre","20":"tag-us-content"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116335482450571319","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}