Serious business

Emily Mortimer on how her father John was asked by Kenneth Tynan to translate Feydeau’s farce and how she wishes he were still around to drink champagne with the current cast

It was in the middle of the Sixties that I had the opportunity of learning the true meaning of farce,’ my father wrote. That was the time he was palling around with Ken Tynan. He used to tell us about an election-night party at Tynan’s house, which included among the guests some life-size wax ladies dressed as nuns, who were to be found sitting on the loos and lying in abandoned attitudes on all the beds. It was the night of the 1966 election, when Harold Wilson’s Labour government got back in with a huge majority and, despite a terrible economic recession, the ‘permissive society’ was in full swing.

When he wasn’t throwing parties for wax-work nuns, the brilliant Tynan was also helping Laurence Olivier set up the National Theatre.