Aldwych Farcical is a term coined by the artist and author
Osbert Lancaster for a style of English interior design fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s. Lancaster devoted a chapter of his 1939 book
Homes Sweet Homes to the style, taking the name from
Aldwych farce starring
Tom Walls and
Ralph Lynn at the
Aldwych Theatre in London. Plays in the series, including
Rookery Nook,
Thark and
Plunder, were set in houses built and decorated in faux-antique rustic style, mostly on the fringes of London. Along with other terms coined by Lancaster, Aldwych Farcical has entered the language and is recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary.
Background
Aldwych farces
Between 1923 and 1933 the
actor-manager Tom Walls presented a series of twelve
at the
Aldwych Theatre in the West End of London, co-starring with the comedy actor
Ralph Lynn. Most of the plays were written by
Ben Travers, and revolved around a series of preposterous incidents involving a misunderstanding, borrowed clothes and lost trousers, and featuring the worldly Walls character, the innocent yet cheeky Lynn, the put-upon
Robertson Hare, the beefy, domineering
Mary Brough, the lean, domineering
Ethel Coleridge, and the ingénue
Winifred Shotter.
[Smith, pp. 50ff] The theatre historian Ronald Strang writes that the farces were "Loosely plotted around the suspicion of sexual improprieties, but enlivened by Travers's playful language, eccentric characters and deft routines". Strang adds that the plays enjoyed "accumulated popular goodwill and an almost legendary theatrical status".
[Strang, p. 17]
Some of the most popular plays in the series, including Thark and Plunder, were set in houses built in rustic style on the fringes of London, in locations such as Horsham and Walton Heath,[Travers (1976), pp. 1 and 32] or sometimes, as in Rookery Nook, further away.[Travers (2014), unnumbered introductory page] In The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (2000), Simon Trussler writes of "incipient tumult fed by a commodious stairway and lots of practical entrances ... characteristic of a genre whose no less incipient (but usually just avoided) combination of social and sexual disasters Coward had also exploited in Hay Fever (1924)".[Trussler, p. 281]
Homes Sweet Homes
In 1938 the artist, cartoonist and author
Osbert Lancaster had a critical and popular success with his book
Pillar to Post, in which he drew and commented on building styles from ancient times to the present day. The tone was light and humorous but Lancaster's purpose was serious: to encourage readers to appreciate the best architecture and reject the worst.
[Knox, p. 41] He followed this in 1939 with
Homes Sweet Homes, which focused on the interiors of old and new buildings. He became known for coining terms for architectural styles.
[Boston, p. 98] In
Pillar to Post he either invented or popularised "Pont Street Dutch", "Stockbrokers Tudor" and "By-pass Variegated";
[Lancaster (1938), pp. 68, 76 and 82] for
Homes Sweet Homes he added, in addition to "Aldwych Farcical", "Curzon Street Baroque" and an interior version of "Stockbrokers Tudor".
[Lancaster (1948), pp. 64, 68 and 70]
In 1959 Lancaster published Here, of All Places, which combined most of Pillar to Post and all of Homes Sweet Homes, with additional text and drawings. Some drawings were redone for the new book but Aldwych Farcical was retained with the original text and drawing unchanged.[Lancaster (1959), pp. 140–141]
Style
The
Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as "Of or relating to an Aldwych farce ... designating a type of architecture or interior design resembling the upper-middle-class domestic setting of this genre".
Lancaster wrote of Aldwych Farcical:
The lounge-hall to which Lancaster refers was typical of the style. In The Last Country Houses Clive Aslet writes, "The informality and half-timbered cosiness suited an upper middle-class ideal".[Aslet, p. 65] He quotes Travers's description of the setting of Rookery Nook:
The historian Rosemary Hill suggests that Lancaster was taking a swipe at the architect Augustus Pugin, whose house in Ramsgate "reinvented the Gothic as a new style for the nineteenth century ... the prototype for hundreds of country rectories and suburban houses".[Hill, pp. 152 and 559]
Sources
