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Larry Gelbart's ancient Roman comedy deserves its London revival, he tells Dominic Maxwell
Larry Gelbart has been a professional comedy writer for 60 years. He was nominated for an Oscar for Tootsie. He reached hundreds of millions of people with M*A*S*H.
But he can't eclipse the memory of something he saw when A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was first playing on Broadway. Gelbart, who wrote the show with Stephen Sondheim and the late Burt Shevelove, was standing at the back of the stalls. One man, in an aisle seat near the stage, appeared to be having the time of his life. As Pseudolus the slave desperately manoeuvred to win his freedom, the man became giddy with laughter. In fact, he laughed so much that he could laugh no more. So, in a moment of complete surrender, he grabbed his raincoat and flung it high above his head. "That was many years ago," Gelbart wrote in his memoirs, Laughing Matters. "I still see that coat in the air."
So watch out for airborne outerwear at the National Theatre. The director Ed Hall is reviving this masterpiece of musical comedy, with Desmond Barrit as Pseudolus - a casting that Gelbart and Sondheim were consulted on. And, 42 years after the show's premiere, Gelbart still sees it as a flawless work. "I have no false modesty about Forum," says Gelbart, a genially outspoken 76-year-old, from his home in Beverly Hills. "Steve (Sondheim) says it's the best book for a musical ever written. And, you know, you have to be very proud that you can tickle somebody so much that they can go out of their mind - certainly out of their raincoat."
Gelbart was already a seasoned pro when Shevelove suggested they write a musical based on the works of Plautus, a Roman writer from the 3rd century BC. When he was 20 he wrote for Bob Hope, then alongside Neil Simon and Mel Brooks on Sid Caesar's TV landmark Your Show of Shows. But when they started work on Forum Gelbart had written nothing longer than a 12-minute sketch. The one-liners came easy; creating a complex, watertight plot took five years.
Studying Plautus's 20-odd surviving plays gave them characters and situations. But despite the result's burlesque spirit they were not trying to update their source so much as to recapture its essence. "His plays are amazing in that they point out that there is nothing new under the sun," enthuses Gelbart. "He would have a character step before the audience and say, 'Don't go to sleep, it's another play by Plautus'. You think of the perennial vaudeville line: 'I know there's people out there, I hear snoring.' It's the same joke."
The show was massive on Broadway and in the West End. Still, most people know it through the 1966 film - a restless reinvention that Gelbart gingerly refers to as "a complete cock-up". But stage revivals - most recently a triumphant run for Nathan Lane on Broadway - keep on coming. "I don't know why I'm going to die and it's going to live," says Gelbart, "though I do know we built it with copper plumbing. It's so sound, structurally, so satisfying to an audience, and it demands so little of them. Mind you, if it's not done by really top, top talent it looks like a dumb, juvenile show. I've seen it happen."
With its playful addresses to the audience, its frantic farcicality and its pompous patricians, it offers plenty of excuses for mugging. "There's something that George Abbott, our first director, said to us, which I've now passed on to Ed Hall. When we sat down for our first reading, we had around the table a wonderful collection of comedians and comic actors. And Abbott said, 'I have one thing to say to you fellows: don't let me catch any of you trying to be funny'. It took me a second to understand what he meant, but it's fabulous advice."
After working on the London production, with Frankie Howerd in 1963, Gelbart stayed on for nine years, semi-retired in Highgate with his wife Pat and five children. "It was a wonderful time not to be in America, during the Vietnam War," he says. Then he was asked to write the TV version of the film M*A*S*H. He went back to Los Angeles to reinvent the sitcom.
Five years writing Forum had taught him never to sacrifice plausibility for a laugh. But M*A*S*H became another turning point as he learnt to apply comic mastery to deadly serious subjects. "Once you taste that kind of freedom of expression," he says, "once you find you can go beyond wily slaves and dominant housewives and braggart warriors - though M*A*S*H had its share of braggart warriors - it's hard to go back to just tap-dancing again."
He moved on to movies. But collaboration grew more irksome. He worked with Dustin Hoffman and the director Sydney Pollack for a year on Tootsie before getting fired. Still, he learnt an important lesson: "Never work with an Oscar-winner who is smaller than the statue."
Since then, Gelbart has produced some of his finest work. His satirical TV films for HBO - Barbarians at the Gate, Weapons of Mass Distraction and last year's And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself (released on DVD next month) - have put Forum's comic glee into some of the sharpest settings in mainstream entertainment. But topicality isn't getting any easier. "I'm no match for what's happening," Gelbart says. "If you're living in this country, and George W. Bush is your president, the headlines are satire."
He has written several plays, but only one other musical, City of Angels, an affectionate spoof of Raymond Chandler yarns and film noir. It got rave reviews when it played the West End in 1993. Audiences, though, stayed away in droves. "I thought it would run for ever," says Gelbart. "I did not realise that for ever does not quite take as long as it used to." Moving to England when he did precluded a follow-up to Forum, though he and Sondheim have considered working together again. "Who knows, if our genetics hold up?"
He wrote a film with Shevelove (The Wrong Box) and they tried to write a play, but it didn't work out. "It was about a group of people who had written a very successful musical, getting together a year later to work on another one and finding out that they couldn't work together any more. And by the time a year had gone by, Burt and I weren't talking to each other any more."
Gelbart still works hard. He's currently writing a film script for Robert Redford, a sequel to Redford's 1972 political drama The Candidate. He knows he may never better Forum's copper-plumbed perfection. But he'll keep on trying. "I've never sat around waiting for the phone to ring," he says. "If I did now, I'd have my phone taken out. They don't call 76-year-old writers in this town, except to say, 'Any comments about your friend who just died?' "
