1948 Charley’s Aunt, by Brandon Thomas, was the prototype London West End farce – the inspiration for a hugely profitable and popular theatrical genre.
The play ran for 1,466 performances from 21 December 1892, with Thomas (now in his mid-forties) playing one of the fathers in the action. On Broadway Charley’s Aunt ran for an even longer four years.
The central element in the plot – as often in farce – is cross-dressing. Two young undergrads at Oxford, and lads around town, Charley Wykeham and Jack Chesney, are in dire need of a chaperone, so they can decently entertain the two young ladies they are sweet on. Charley’s aunt (whom he has never met, and who is coming from Brazil, ‘where the nuts grow’) will serve, they decide, perfectly. But she is delayed and a friend, Lord Fancourt Babberly, is prevailed on to impersonate her. Complications ensue.
Charley’s Aunt became folkloric, thanks to repertory company performances over the years and film adaptations. Astonishingly, there was enough life left in this Victorian fun-piece for a musical adaptation, Where’s Charley? (music by Frank Loesser, ‘book’ by George Abbott), to break box-office records half a century later.
Where’s Charley? (which adheres more or less faithfully to the original 1892 plot) opened on 11 October 1948 and ran for an astonishing 792 performances. It greatly enhanced the stardom of Ray Bolger, as Charley. He went on to reprise the part in the 1952 film version.
Bolger (born in 1904, famous as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz) would have seemed somewhat too old to play an Oxford undergraduate, and the part was changed to ‘graduate’, to make him more plausible.
The London version (which ran for 404 performances) starred Norman Wisdom as Charley. He, like Bolger, is one of the less-likely actors one would (if plausibility were a factor) have cast as an Oxonian gilded youth. But in farce, anything goes.