About the work
A boulevard farce by British writer Ray Cooney, which premiered under its original title "Two into One" on 19 March 1981 at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, directed by Roger Redfarn, with Cooney himself in the cast. Wolfgang Spier's German-language version, "Wenn schon, denn schon," opened on 5 September 1985 at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in Berlin.
Plot
Government minister Richard Willey plans a tryst with his secretary at the same London hotel where his wife is supposedly at the theatre. When his assistant books the room next door under a false name, mistaken rooms, white lies and a waiter draw him into an ever more absurd spiral of confusion.
Cultural significance
After a long West End run at the Shaftesbury Theatre, "Two into One" became one of Cooney's most widely performed plays; a German television recording of the Berlin production brought the farce to a wide audience in 1986.