'A brave man'

One Man, Two Guvnors, by British playwright Richard Bean, opens in Mumbai. He explains why he is funny about serious things.

Richard Bean has made a name for himself as the “hot new playwright” in Britain in the last decade, for his historical insight and ability to keep an audience awake even when dealing with subjects as austere as racism and immigration, climate change, Irish American support for IRA terrorism, and the politics of the European Union.

Bean, 55, says the most serious issues can be discussed only in the form of jokes. “Do you know who I blame for the depressed state of the British economy?” he asks, via email from London. “Woodwork teachers, because woodwork teachers made you think it was OK to spend three months making one lousy cheese board. Japanese kids are turning out 3,000 cheese boards every lesson.”

Bean’s latest offering, One Man, Two Guvnors, an English version of Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century classic, The Servant of Two Masters, will be staged at the NCPA today. In the play Francis Henshall is fired from a band and becomes minder to Roscoe Crabbe, a London petty criminal. But Roscoe is in fact his sister Rachel, posing as her own dead brother, who was killed by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers. Holed up at the Cricketers’ Arms, Francis takes a second job with one Stanley Stubbers, who is hiding from the police and waiting to be re-united with Rachel. To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his two “guvnors” apart.

“I had seen various vignettes of commedia dell’arte in my lifetime but I had never seen a full production,” says Bean of Goldoni’s work. “When the National Theatre [of the UK] asked me to adapt A Servant of Two Masters I asked for a literal translation, as I wanted to get back as close as possible to Goldoni. Literal translations are by their nature bland and dull to read, but that very dullness gives one a freedom to be creative. A literal is really only the basics without any flourishes. All the flourishes are then one’s own.”

Bean came to writing late, in his early 40s. After graduating with a psychology degree, he spent six years as a personnel officer and then 10 years as an occupational psychologist by day and stand-up comedian by night. His life as a stand-up comic is evidently a major reference point in his plays, although Bean says it was playwright Arthur Miller’s semi-autobiographical novel that shaped him. “I was about 23 when I started reading Tropic of Capricorn,” he says, “which relates Miller’s time in New York working as a personnel officer. The anarchy, alcohol, sex and madness of Miller’s life contrasted with the very constrained and proper world in which I was operating. I think Miller corrupted me, destroyed that me, if you like.”

A couple of years ago this Miller-esque attitude of strong belief in an artist’s freedom of expression, expressed in Bean’s play England People Very Nice, angered some Bangladeshi and Irish because of its supposed racial contents. “England People Very Nice is a play about how the English are a mongrel nation,” he says. “The controversy was cooked up and kept cooking by really rather stupid people, most of whom were journalists at the Guardian or the BBC. The hero of the play was a Bangladeshi man, an Anglophile and a hero. Most Guardian journalists have a third class degree in zoology and don’t understand that what a character says on stage isn’t necessarily what the [play’s] author thinks, believes or says to his children.”

For most of Bean’s short playwriting career, however, the same critics have been generous with their compliments. They called him “a brave man” for attempting “a potted history of Irish republican movement” in The Big Fellah, even after the controversy around England People Very Nice.

One Man, Two Guvnors, directed by Nicholas Hytner, September 25, 3 pm and 7 pm, at the Dance Theatre Godrej, NCPA, Nariman Point