I’m a great believer that bad weather outside leads to creativity inside. It certainly did for me when in the mid-1980s, during the heaviest snow London had seen in years, I wrote a play called Laugh? I Nearly Went to Miami!
I was living in a tiny flat on Shoot Up Hill in Cricklewood and was busy trying to come up with a good plot for a play.
Then coming back from a holiday I was standing with all the flight’s passengers waiting at the luggage carousel for our cases to appear.
Now we all know the procedure; you wait forever for the damn things to appear and then it’s like a scrum as one owner after another tries to grab their bags as they go flying by. If you miss them, you have to wait until they reappear.
It occurred to me what would stop you from picking up someone else’s suitcase either by accident or design? And then leave the airport with someone else’s luggage?
Provided they didn’t see you, (in which case you could feign mistaken identity), absolutely nothing.
And so my little acorn was sown. Why not have someone accidentally pick up the wrong case (in this instance an Elvis Presley fanatic who is trying to get to a Elvis convention in Florida so he can marry his fiancee), who then only realises it is the wrong case when he gets home?
And then when he opens the case in his sitting room he finds it is stuffed with thousands of dollars. Make those dollars property of a Mafia boss and I worked out you might have a recipe for a few laughs.
I sat down to write the play in longhand on the first day that London had been snowed in for years. The fall was heavy and my part of north-west London completely ground to a halt.
This was lucky for me. I had nothing to distract me as the snow got worse and worse. I couldn’t even pop out to the pub! Outside it snowed and snowed, inside I wrote and wrote. Eventually I finished the play and typed it up.
With my wife Narelle and a good friend of ours, Tony Worgan, we decided to mount a production in Hampstead at Leonie Scott-Matthews’ Pentameters Theatre.
We held open auditions at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden and found a great cast in Russell Wootton, Jill Greenacre, David Bradshawe, Andrea Gordon, Gillian Vickers, John Lyne-Pirkis and Christopher Prior.
Under the directorial eye of Charles Harris who came freshly to us from directing Brookside, we spent two weeks rehearsing in The Drill Hall in Chenies Street just off Tottenham Court Road.
Rik Carmichael designed a fabulous set and with stage manager Kate Stewart and lighting expert David Hardstaff aboard, the show opened on June 7th 1985.
The first night went better than we had hoped but nothing could prepare me for what happened the following day.
I turned up at the stage door and was astonished to see a long line of people trailing down the alleyway outside the theatre.
Word of mouth had got around that Laugh? Miami! was a funny show and a must-see. I was staggered. The rest of the run was a sell-out. I was even more staggered.
It just so happened that I had sent a copy of the play to theatre publishers Samuel French Ltd a few weeks before. My timing, for once, could not have been better. Some reasonable reviews prompted them to send two representatives to come and see the show. The next morning, John Bedding at French’s wrote to me asking if the publishing and performing rights were available?
I found myself an agent, Tessa Le Bars, and an acting edition of the play was published. This opened Laugh? Miami! to a great many people who otherwise might not have been aware of it.
Andre Ptaszynski and Andrew Fell at Pola Jones Ltd took a West End option on the play and plans were prepared to bring it into London. And although the play never ended up on Shaftesbury Avenue, it’s funny how when one door closes another one opens.
Glynis Barber, at the time the hottest thing on British TV in Dempsey and Makepeace, was approached through her agent Rolf Kruger to play Alice. Although sadly she wasn’t available, Rolf liked the play and passed it on to another of his clients, director Cyril Frankel.
Now Cyril was an established movie and TV director who sidelined in mounting stage comedies in Vienna. (He had made two of my favourite shows Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and UFO).
He called me up and invited me around for lunch the next day at his home in Harley Street. “I love Laugh? I Nearly Went To Miami!” he explained over lunch. “It reminds me of the Marx Brothers, completely bonkers but somehow plausible. I want to produce it in Vienna, if I may, at the Kleine Komodie Theatre. What do you say?”
And that was how my little play opened under its new German title …Und Morgen Fliegen Wir Nach Miami the following March. Playwright Adolf Opel did a superb and very funny translation and Cyril directed it with a masterly comedic brilliance.
Narelle and I flew over to attend the first night and it was odd to watch audiences laughing at lines I had written being said in a different language. The show’s leading actors Gaby Jacoby, Viktor Couzyn and Rudolf Otahal brought the house down night after night.
The play then went on to enjoy further success across Europe in translations by Ursula Lyn and Adolf Opel as well as Martine Deboosere who wrote the Dutch version We Hebben Zien Vlieggen!
In 2016 a Hungarian version, Elvis, Oltar, Miami, translated by Benedek Albert and produced by Banfalvy Studio opened in Budapest and in 2023 it was produced in South Korea under a new title The Gatecrasher.
It never ceases to amaze me how well nutty little English farces seem to travel.
Read more about Laugh? I Nearly Went to Miami! here.