Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

236 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
Alan Ayckbourn has written 79 plays to date, winning him Tony, Olivier, and Molière awards (the top playwriting prizes
in the United States, England, and France) and a truly global reputation for his intricate dramaturgy, multilevel plots,
and great comic skill. His Bedroom Farce, directed by Peter Hall in London in 2010, involves four married couples and
takes place in three of their bedrooms—all on the same night and mostly at the same time. Pictured are Daniel Betts as
Malcolm and Finty Williams as Kate. © Geraint Lewis
the theatre; since the days of Aristophanes in ancient
Greece and Plautus in Rome, comedians have entertained
the public with puns, antics, social commentaries,
and a host of other amusing reflections on the human
struggle. It is an axiom of the theatre that “comedy is
serious business,” and the true comedian is understood
to be as inspired an artist as any who labors under the
lights. Comedy is rarely accorded its fair share of academic
consideration, however, partly because it tends to
be topical and therefore less than universal, and partly
because the very thing that makes comedy popular—its
accessibility—also makes it seem relatively simple. But
simple does not mean simple-minded, and the relative
scarcity of fine comic plays originating in any generation
attests to the enormous talent it takes to write, direct, and
act comedically.
In America, Neil Simon (born 1927) has, for decades,
exhibited enormous talent and success as a writer of light
comedy for the stage (and film), and in England, Alan
Ayckbourn (born 1939) has demonstrated comparable
mastery. Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce was first produced
in 1975 by the Library Theatre in Scarborough, England,
with which Ayckbourn has long been associated; the play
was subsequently produced by the National Theatre in
London in 1977 and came to Broadway and various other
American cities shortly thereafter.
Like all of Ayckbourn’s works, Bedroom Farce is
an ingenious comedy of manners, novel in its dramatic
structure and reasonably true to life in its concerns. The
setting for Bedroom Farce is three bedrooms, all in view
simultaneously. The characters consist of four couples
who, for reasons cleverly worked out in the plot, find
themselves rotating through one bedroom after another.
Although the innuendos of this play are highly sexual, the
action consists primarily of animated verbal exchanges
and comic business and pratfalls.
The opening scene of Bedroom Farce—an exchange
of dialogue between Ernest and Delia, the oldest couple