| British stage comedy from the late 1950's to the present can be characterized as self-regarding comedy. working in the tradition of Wilde and Shaw, contemporary British playwrights Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppaid, Alan Ayckbourn and Caryl Churchill have written comedies which alter the traditional elements of stage comedy: character, plot, language, theme and laughter. Distortion of these elements foregrounds and interrogates the plays' comedic identity, so that these plays create a strong awareness of their own status as comedy, and lead us to question traditional assumptions about the limits of the genre of comedy.;Through detailed analysis of individual plays I examine how these playwrights alter and update stock characters and boy-meets-girl plots, and how they move away from traditional exposition and neatly resolved linear plotlines. Their comedies rework the romantic hero and heroine, and other stock characters. Their works may end unhappily, or simply stop without providing the explanations and resolutions associated with the traditional comic ending. Similarly, they may use oblique, cryptic, or densely layered language rather than the straightforward language typically associated with comedy. They write comedies about such unusual subjects as the connection between gender roles and colonialism (Churchill's Cloud Nine), Chaos theory and English nineteenth-century landscape gardening (Stoppard's Arcadia) or a woman experiencing a complete mental breakdown (Ayckbourn's Woman In Mind). Though these subjects seem too cerebral or too grim to be funny, the plays in fact do produce laughter, but this laughter cannot be explained In traditional terms as either celebratory or corrective. Through heavily parodic and Ironic use of comic elements and a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, the self-regarding comedy of the late twentieth-century British stage forces us to redefine and update our definitions of comedy. |
