Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [63]
Much, if not all, was forgiven after opening night, when Brouhaha proved to be a hit, though not all the reviews were quite as glowing as the Times correspondent led his readers to believe. One English critic snorted that Brouhaha “will appeal only to addicts of the type of humor served up by the Marx Bros.,” a remark that was apparently meant to be an insult. Another commented that “a mildly absurd initial situation is put through the mill of verbal and situating extravagance: deliberate irrelevance, banality, wild quasi-improvised pantomime twist it and turn it, inflate it only to prick the bubble.” As for Peter, the critic wrote, “calculated inconsequence and a kind of dynamic helplessness are mother’s milk to him. Tall, plump and dark, he also revealed a personality of enormous kindliness and charm.”
The Daily Mail was more abrupt: “Brou, but not enough haha.”
Still London scribes did tend to agree that Brouhaha’s success depended entirely on Peter, and that he more than carried it off in his appealing, gleeful, manic, multipersonality way. In the trial scene, for instance, Peter played judge, counsel, and prisoner. The judge turned up at one point in a garbage can.
Advance ticket sales were brisk enough that even on opening night British theater wags were already mulling over the most obvious risk of taking the show to New York: “Careful casting would likely be needed for a Broadway presentation, because the comedy has been re-written and tailored to suit the particular requirements of Sellers.”
In other words, Sellers’s Brouhaha was radically open to improvisation. On the night of October 16, Peter got carried away, waltzed off the stage, and fell into the orchestra pit. He pulled Hermione Harvey (playing Mrs. Alma Exegis Diddle) right along with him. The audience thought it was hilarious, but when they saw Peter’s face contorting in agony they fell into silence. Sellers’s leg was badly cut. Harvey suffered bruises as well. Peter, still a trouper, made an effort to go on with the show but simply couldn’t manage it, and his understudy finished the performance. Anne, who was in the audience that night, thought at first that the whole thing was just a new bit—a little extreme, perhaps, but given Peter’s tendency to depart from the script, not entirely without precedent. “But when I went round to the dressing room poor Peter was lying there saying some very unfunny things.” She whisked him home in their latest Rolls-Royce.
“I found Peter a great joy to work with, wholly generous and wonderfully inventive,” the actor Leo McKern recalled of his experiences with Peter in Brouhaha. (McKern played Tyepkin, the Soviet envoy, but he also appeared with Peter in four films.) “Innovation and continual invention was essential to keep him interested, and the straitjacket of conventional reproduction was not for him.” These inventions not only included ad-libs and funny if irrelevant accents. Peter also found it personally amusing to stroll up to the footlights and engage in conversation—albeit one-sided—with the audience. Peter Hall once commented on what it was like to direct him: “It was one of the most amazing and terrible experiences of my life, because one of the things about working in the theater is that you have to repeat what you do. . . . Peter couldn’t bear doing it again and again.”
“I went to see him in it,” Alec Guinness noted. “It was pretty lousy. Sellers knew I was in the stalls. Suddenly, in the middle of a speech, he came down to the footlights and saluted and said, ‘That’s to you, Captain Guinness!’ The audience had no idea what he was talking about.”
McKern remembered that one night Peter’s inventions got the best of him after he showed up for the performance absolutely drunk. It was, in McKern’s description, “after some kind of reception or other.” Actually, it was after a party thrown in honor of Alec Guinness’s knighthood. Peter had stopped by on his way to the Aldwych. Beaujolais flowed, much of it into Peter’s glass. Kenneth Tynan picks up the tale: “He arrived at the theater beamingly tight and admitted