Playwright who mixed a comic brew of weird suburban characters and absurd situations
The playwright NF Simpson, who has died aged 92, was hailed by the critic Kenneth Tynan in 1958 as "the most gifted comic writer the English stage has discovered since the war". He was generally identified with the Theatre of the Absurd movement alongside Eug�ne Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. But Simpson was peculiarly and singularly English in his absurdism. He turned suburban characters into weird chatterboxes and language into highly imaginative chop logic, and mixed a comic brew that derived more recognisably from the worlds of Lewis Carroll, WS Gilbert and the Goons, without the puerile edge that came along with Monty Python.
His first play to be produced was A Resounding Tinkle (1957), which in its original two-act form won third prize in an Observer playwriting competition organised by Tynan and was produced as a Sunday night "without decor" production at the Royal Court. A freewheeling dissertation on comedy involving critics and comedians, interspersed with "a play", it was ? according to its director, William Gaskill ? imaginative and witty, but difficult.
Partly at Gaskill's suggestion, Simpson reduced the text to a one-acter which concentrated on the comedy of a couple who find an elephant in their garden which is different from the one they had ordered. Gaskill directed it with another short Simpson play, The Hole, in which a crowd of people stand around a hole in the ground and try to impose their own fantastic vision of what is going on down there on each other.
The cast of this 1958 double-bill included Wendy Craig, Nigel Davenport, Sheila Ballantine and Robert Stephens. It was a huge hit, proving to Tynan that Simpson was no "flash in the pen, but a true lord of language, capable of using words with the sublime, outrageous authority of Humpty Dumpty".
An extraordinary impact was rounded off in 1959 when Peter Cook ? who owed much of his wild-eyed, raincoated monologist EL Wisty to Simpson ? appeared at Cambridge in a student revival of the two-act A Resounding Tinkle, directed by John Bird. Also that year, Gaskill directed Simpson's next major play, probably his best, One Way Pendulum, at the Royal Court. This new work was described by the author as "an evening of high drung and slarrit" which, "with its turrets and its high-jointed gables, should have a particular appeal for anyone approaching it for the first time with a lasso". A character in the play wore pearls round her waist "for tightness".
Although a 1964 film captured something of the play's anarchic lunacy, with Eric Sykes constructing a model of the Old Bailey in his living room while a mute Jonathan Miller taught 100 speak-your-weight machines to sing the Hallelujah Chorus, the play was too theatrical for the cinema. How to reproduce the bonding hilarity of a nightmare game of three-handed whist for two players without cards in the dark?
Simpson had first arrived at the Royal Court with no experience of theatre but, said Gaskill, like many good writers he knew exactly how the actors should deliver the lines and where they should pause for the laughter that arrived only in the performance, not the rehearsal.
Simpson was born in London. He became known as "Wally" after Wallis Simpson, consort of the abdicated Edward VIII and subsequent Duchess of Windsor. Simpson's father was a glass-blower by trade and a strict Baptist who did not allow his family to attend the theatre. His son went to Emanuel school in Battersea, south-west London, studied English at the University of London, worked as a bank clerk, served in the Royal Artillery and with the intelligence corps in the second world war, and taught at the City of Westminster College and as an extra-mural lecturer between 1946 and 1962.
Six years after One Way Pendulum came The Cresta Run (1965), a weird and sinister espionage drama: why exactly were 16.5 million people out of the country at the time of the Norman conquest? There was no significant theatre writing after Was He Anyone? (1972), a faint echo of the earlier plays, with more than 30 characters, but Simpson wrote several more television plays including Elementary My Dear Watson, a Sherlock Holmes parody for John Cleese for the BBC Comedy Playhouse in 1973, and material for Beryl Reid, Sheila Hancock, Ned Sherrin and Dick Emery. In 1976 he returned to the Royal Court, where he spent two years as literary manager.
The suddenness of Simpson's arrival was matched only by that of his departure. After writing many radio scripts and television plays, and contributing to several West End revues working alongside Cook, Pinter, John Mortimer and Kenneth Williams, he stopped producing work abruptly in 1983 and spent the next 12 years travelling around the canals of England on a narrowboat. "It was the happiest time of my life," he told the journalist Stephen Pile, who tracked him down to a clifftop house on the edge of a Cornish village in 2007 after the Royal Court had arranged a reading ? for the theatre's 50th anniversary celebrations ? of the full-length A Resounding Tinkle.
His theatrical farewell in 1983 had also been Ralph Richardson's, the great actor sleepwalking through his own nightmare and accusing a whole family of murdering a friend of his, in Simpson's neat but oddly flavourless translation of Eduardo de Filippo's Inner Voices at the National Theatre.
In 2007 the Donmar Warehouse revived two early Simpson plays, plus a new piece by Michael Frayn, for a triple bill, Absurdia, which was directed by Douglas Hodge and reminded audiences of what they had been missing for so long. The short-form version of A Resounding Tinkle was this time paired with Gladly Otherwise, in which a furniture inspector asks householders about their absence of floor and is told that it's under the carpet ("making full use of it, I hope?").
Simpson had by then moved to Cornwall with his partner, Elizabeth Holder, and started work on a new play for the National Theatre, If So, Then Yes, set in a retirement home where a resident dictates his memoirs, despite constant interruptions. The National was perhaps cowed by its structure and large cast, which includes "5,000 red indians ? optional", so his last work had a reading at the Royal Court and a surprise, but unpersuasive, premiere in September 2010 at the little Jermyn Street theatre off Piccadilly Circus.
Simpson married Joyce Bartlett in 1944 and had one child, Judith, with her. He and Joyce later divorced. He is survived by Elizabeth, Judith and a granddaughter.
? Norman Frederick Simpson, playwright, born 29 January 1919; died 27 August 2011
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/aug/31/nf-simpson-obituary
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