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Why This Farce?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Vera Gottlieb
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Abstract

In exploring the repertoire of farce from its nineteenth-century exponents in France and England through the ‘typically British’ pre- and post-war varieties at the Aldwych and the Whitehall, to the work of such contemporary exponents as Alan Ayckboum and Michael Frayn, Vera Gottlieb also analyzes the ways in which ‘mechanistic’ or ‘clockwork’ kinds of farce are philosophically akin to absurdist drama. She suggests that English approaches to Chekhov have overlaid his work with similar assumptions – as in the contention of Michael Frayn, himself both a Chekhov translator and a highly successful farceur, that Chekhov's characters are ‘reduced by their passions to the level of blind and inflexible machines’. In arguing that this is not the case, she elaborates a crucial distinction between farces which, in effect, assume the impotence of human aspirations, and those in which behaviour derives from character rather than from imposed situations, thus offering at least the potential for change. Vera Gottlieb is Professor of Drama at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982) and Chekhov in Performance in Russia and Soviet Russia (Chadwyck-Healey, 1984). She was also translator and director of A Chekhov Quartet, first seen at the New End Theatre, London, in 1990, and subsequently at the Chekhov Festival in Yalta and the GITIS Theatre in Moscow.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 27 , August 1991 , pp. 217 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

Notes and References

1. Gloucester, in King Lear, Act IV, Scene i.

2. Ionesco, Eugène, Notes and Counter-Notes, trans. Watson, Donald (London: Calder, 1964), p. 25Google Scholar.

3. Edmund, in King Lear, Act I, Scene ii.

4. Ionesco, op. cit., p. 24.

5. Ibid., p. 113.

6. Billington, Michael, The Guardian, 11 08 1989Google Scholar.

7. See Gottlieb, Vera, Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 127–9Google Scholar.

8. ‘One of the ways in which the farce author involved his audience was by addressing it directly, confiding in it, appealing for approval, and frankly stressing the non-realistic nature of his genre by directing attention to the strings on which his puppets dance.’ See Michael Booth, Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Manchester University Press), p. 125. For a discussion of similar techniques in Ayckbourn, see Kalson, Albert E., ‘On Stage, Off Stage and Backstage with Alan Ayckbourn’, in Themes in Drama 10: Farce, ed. Redmond, James (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 251–8Google Scholar.

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11. Quoted in Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), p. 142Google Scholar.

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14. Quoted in Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, op. cit., p. 92.

15. Quoted in Michael Booth, Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre, op. cit., p. 147.

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19. Ibid., p. 8.

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36. Ibid., p. 9.

37. Comparable to the television situation comedy After Henry, in which the generations may clash, but the values do not, and unlike the earlier The Good Life in which two modes of living are comically opposed to each other.

38. Robert Brustein, Who Needs Theatre, op. cit., p. 157.

39. Ibid., p. 157–8.

40. Frayn, Michael, Introduction to The Sneeze (London: Methuen, 1989), p. xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar, and programme notes.

41. Jessica Milner Davis, op. cit., p. 23.

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43. Quoted in Worth, Katherine, Oscar Wilde (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 20–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. See Vera Gottlieb, Chekhov and the Vaudeville, op. cit., p. 79.

45. Ibid., p. 189.

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47. Eugène Ionesco, op. cit., p. 91.

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49. Wardle, Irving, The Times, 26 01 1973Google Scholar.

50. See London Theatre Record, VIII, No. 20 (1988).

51. The one-act play festivals (local, regional, and national) specify that a chosen play must have a minimum of three parts; amateur groups tend to avoid anything too serious (Beckett or Shaw), since it is hoped that an actively amused audience will influence the adjudicator. Chekhov is therefore a popular choice and played ‘for laughs’.

52. Robert Brustein, Who Needs Theatre, p. 222–3.

53. Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-Notes, p. 95.

54. George Brandt, op. cit., p. 166.

55. Dürrenmatt, quoted in George Brandt, op. cit., p. 172.