Simon and Laura
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| Written by | Alan Melville (play and screenplay) |
Simon and Laura is a 1954 stage comedy by Alan Melville that in 1955 became a Rank Organisation film produced at Pinewood Studios.
Satirising the early days of BBC Television, Simon and Laura focuses on an argumentative theatrical couple called Simon and Laura Foster; they've been together for some 20 years and are given a new lease of life when playing a faux-harmonious version of 'themselves' in a daily soap opera filmed in their own home. Presented by H M Tennent Ltd, the play began a provincial tour at the Opera House Manchester on 30 August 1954, subsequently opening at the Strand Theatre in London's West End on 25 November. Directed by Murray Macdonald, it starred Roland Culver, Coral Browne, Ian Carmichael, Dora Bryan, Ernest Thesiger and Esma Cannon, with settings designed by Alan Tagg.
According to Frances Stephens, editor of Theatre World, "Simon and Laura has as its amusing central theme the guying of television family serials and the author is well served by the very talented cast." "We have often been taken, with sufficiently comic results, behind the scenes in the playhouse and film studio," noted The Stage, "but it has remained for Mr Melville to exploit television, the latest form of entertainment. He does it very well, though most of the characters are absurd rather than human as we know humanity in the auditorium. The dialogue abounds in lines that arouse an involuntary chuckle or laugh; the situations, if occasionally laboured, are ingenious and hilarious." The play's centerpiece – when the filming of the soap's 200th edition goes disastrously wrong – was referred to as a "glorious free-for-all rumpus before the cameras."
Other estimates were less enthusiastic. "The comedy," claimed The Times, "is not, taken as a whole, a particularly good one, but there are a great many quips which will come home to the business and bosoms of [television] viewers."Kenneth Tynan, in The Observer, concluded that "As a mechanical tilt at television, the play is acceptable, though the plot is a rattle of dry bones." Despite these critiques, the play was a success; it moved to the Apollo Theatre on 14 February 1955 and was seen by HM Queen Elizabeth on 24 March. In all it ran for six months, closing on 28 May.
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