RUN FOR YOUR WIFE! by Ray Cooney opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1983 at the same time as he formed the Theatre of Comedy there, and included in its roll of honour are such names as Richard Briers, Bernard Cribbins, James Bolam, Rodney Bewes, Ian Ogilvy, Terry Scott, Lionel Jeffries, Henry McGee, Stratford Johns, Bill Pertwee, Windsor Davies, Ralph Bates, Jack Watling, Sophie Lawrence, Una Stubbs, Aimi Macdonald, Ian Lavender, Robin Askwith and Britt Ekland. “We changed the cast every three months so we could get interesting TV names to fit it in between their TV series,” said Ray, “and it was a very happy time. We had about 20 different casts over a period of twelve years in the West End, and a lot of people came back to do it again because it was such fun.”

One of the regulars during the play’s 25-year history has been Eric Sykes who probably played Porterhouse more than anyone, and formed a Porterhouse club for fellow actors such as Alfred Marks, Lionel Jeffries and Dennis Ramsden, who played the detective sergeant over the years. It is still touring the country 25 years on! Ray himself is no stranger to the cast list. He both acted in and directed the play on Broadway, appeared in it in Florida and, more recently, ‘had such fun’ playing Bobby in a cruise ship production. “Acting for me is an indulgence,” he added.

Ray describes each of his 20 stage comedies as ‘the most enjoyable when it’s your ‘baby’ and you are in that stage of production’, but says that because of the length of its London run, RUN FOR YOUR WIFE! is perhaps the best known. “To me it seems to be one of my most recent plays; I can’t believe it’s 26 years since we first tried it out in Guildford. But there have been over 500 productions of it all over the world, from America and Canada to Argentina and South Korea and Iceland to Australia, while the number of performances over the years must run into the hundreds of thousands. And it’s been translated into 35 languages… Japanese, Chinese, Russian. French, German, Spanish, Italian. It would be easier to say which languages it hasn’t been performed in. “I wrote farce because I was an actor who appeared in a lot of farces and I did not realise how much I had learned,” he continued. “To write my kind of plays you need to understand what it’s like to be on stage.”

YVONNE ARNAUD THEATRE

Mary Smith - Carol Hawkins

Barabara Smith - Helen Gill

John Smith - Ray Cooney

DS Troughton - Peter Blake

Stanley Gardener - Royce Mills

Reporter - Arthur Bostrom

DS Porterhouse - Bill Pertwee

Bobby Franklyn - Jimmy Thompson

Lady Visitor - Jan Goodman