Echoes of A Resounding Tinkle: N. F. Simpson Reconsidered

Echoes of A Resounding Tinkle: N. F. Simpson Reconsidered C. Z. FOTHERGILL • WHEN REVIEWING CRESTA RUN at the Royal Court Theatre, J. R. Taylor said of Simpson, "Simpson, I find, is one of those writers it is impossible to argue about. You either find him funny or you don't, and there is no possibility to compromise.... A lot of the humour .,. is too painfully strenuous and fourth-form to pass muster even as absurd, let alone Absurd.,,1 That he should speak so disparagingly of Cresta Run is not surprising; Anger and After already established Taylor's opinion of Simpson's merit. However, there is another and equally vocal point of view. George Wellwarth calls Taylor "humorlessly obtuse,,2 and joins with Martin Esslin3 in a paean of praise for Simpson's Absurdist skill. The question remains - does Simpson amount to anything? There is no denying that N. F. Simpson has created a style distinctly his own. Just as we know what the Pinter world is like, so can we quickly identify the zaniness that is characteristically Simps~m. Revelling in the trickery of paradox and verbal gymnastics, Simpson can be labelled neither Absurdist nor, (although Esslin and Wellwarth insist on it for him), a "powerful social critic"; nor is he just a witty clown desperately trying to persuade us his jokes are significant. Simpson's seriousness, when he falls into it, lies somewhere in between. He has said in interview that he finds the world screamingly funny,4 that everything, even nonsense itself, is completely ridiculous. Moreover, he speaks of his theatre as "corrective" - that "the retreat from reason"s is "a safeguard against an overreliance on reason.,,6 He intends us to learn from our laughter. The question remains as the critic Pepper in A Resounding Tinkle phrased it: "that's just what I'm never quite sure about - what is it we're being asked to do here? Are we being asked to laugh at him, laugh with him - or are we meant, God forbid, to take him seriously?" (RT 1, 69). 299 300 c. Z. FOTHERGILL One may approach Simpson's style through a subtitle of his own: farce in a new dimension. In the first version of A Resounding Tinkle the critics bandy terminology about, trying to find the exact label for the inset play fmally Mustard ingeniously manages to incorporate them all: "It is, basically, a parody of a skit on satire that he's burlesquing and the farce is so to speak a by-product of that. I don't think he's aiming at farce at all. The farce is in a sense what we, the audience, contribute" (RT 1, 70-71). But One Way Pendulum Simpson specifically calls a farce. Farce as a descriptive term is associated with stereotyped flat characters, intricate improbable situations and a well developed sense of the ridiculous. Laughter is its most essential ingredient. The dividing line between comedy and farce has never been clear. In N. F. Simpson the plot is the stage action, the characters are certainly one-dimensional, and the milieu is a fantasy world with parallels to our own. The fantasy is based on reality. To locate Simpson's particular brand of farce one must precisely describe the nature of that relationship. Simpson insists that his characters are ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. He says, when speaking of One Way Pendulum, "It's only the trappings that are way out."7 Moreover, he believes the comic effect derives from this incongruity: "if they're played in any other way than as ordinary people, the whole thing ceases to be in the slightest degree comic."g I am sure Simpson would add that these are not farces of the vulgar mode. They are farces for the alert intelligence, and not as Mrs. Vinegar would have it, for "a sophisticated audience flagging" (RT 1, 70). As the surrogate author declares in A Resounding Tinkle: "the retreat from reason means precious little to anyone who has never caught up with reason in the first place. It takes a trained mind to relish a non sequitur" (RT 1, 74). But it is not the fine...