Ray Cooney Overview

With names like "Run for Your Wife" and "Wife Begins at Forty," Cooney's plays are ready to pratfall easily into the puddle of "take my wife, please..." humor or to lollygag about the "garters-'n-boxers" school of comedy à la Benny Hill... [more]

With names like "Run for Your Wife" and "Wife Begins at Forty," Cooney's plays are ready to pratfall easily into the puddle of "take my wife, please..." humor or to lollygag about the "garters-'n-boxers" school of comedy à la Benny Hill (where nothing is funnier than a dropped pair of drawers). However, Cooney's works also often share a likeness to the more sophisticated slapstick of Monty Python (like the "Say na more...kno wot I mean?" elbowing sketch). The combination of cleverness and absolute accessibility is what has made Cooney one of the most successful and widely produced playwrights in the world. Cooney began acting as a child, in 1946. He appeared onstage throughout the '50s and '60s, cutting his teeth at Brian Rix's farce company at Whitehall Theatre in London. He wrote his first play in 1961. In 1983 he created his own Theatre of Comedy, at London's Shaftesbury Theatre. His most well-known play, "Run for Your Wife" (1983), involves a cabbie who smoothly maintains a life of covert bigamy -- two wives on opposite sides of town -- until his chivalrous attempt to save a little old lady from a mugging lands him in jail and then in the hospital. Both wives get wind of the accident and comic highjinks ensue! It's the longest running play on London's West End. Cooney's comedies are favorites with regional theater companies in the States, possibly because their sexual and political innuendo, while abundant, remains quite tame. [show less]