"Sunset" (1983) is altogether elegiac, and — though its tone is wonderfully muted — often close to tragedy.
It confirms my belief that the best farces are often too close to tragedy to be funny.
The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596 97) uses a double plot structure to contrast a tale of romantic wooing with one that comes close to tragedy.
"As I understood it," Orton wrote, "farce originally was very close to tragedy, and differed only in the treatment of its themes — themes like rape, bastardy, prostitution".
"As I understood it," Orton wrote, "farce originally was very close to tragedy, and differed only in the treatment of its themes themes like rape, bastardy, prostitution".
People attending the meetings were still in shock, and Ms. Evans had no idea how close the tragedy would have hit individual members in her groups, all of whom live within commuting distance of the World Trade Center.
Quoting Beckett's 1945 realization that his artistic path would henceforth be "in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding," Mr. Toibin is eloquent on Beckett's view of "consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime, its perpetrators to be punished by offering them infinite numbers of absurd logical conclusions".
You can laugh at it now and then, but its overall impact is closer to tragedy, and overwhelming.
Their melancholy poetry transmuted an overriding mood of self-pity into something deeper and closer to tragedy.
