When the guys from Syracuse visit Ephesus, identities are repeatedly mistaken and serious farce begins almost immediately.
Other important new voices in American drama were the prolific Lanford Wilson, Pulitzer winner for Talley's Folly (1979); John Guare, who created serious farce in The House of Blue Leaves (1971) and fresh social drama in Six Degrees of Separation (1990); and Ntozake Shange, whose "choreopoem" For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf moved to Broadway in 1976.
The Hypocrite is a serious farce set during the English civil war, when the city was the first place to close its gates on Charles I; and there will be a "response play" to a 1970s script by a well-known northern dramatist, which Bean asks me to keep vague "because I haven't written to ask his permission yet".
Or "Habeas Corpus," a half-serious farce, staged way back in 1973, about the libido's clamorous, inescapable demands.
I'm not exactly sure when it developed, but I've come to realize I have a pretty serious allergy to farce.
This deeply serious, utterly hilarious black farce was a runaway international success.
In an era when some politicians and much of the popular press seemed to be stoking racial fear, she was turning fear into farce — but serious, and disturbing, farce, intended to punch a hole in pervasive fictions while acknowledging their power.
Or they use racial stuff, but the word "Vietnam" is never there.What is the right tone for the play?It's the spirit of a farce with serious material.
When I asked Syms whether the lecture, which seems to blur sincerity and farce, was serious — if she believed, to any degree, in these edicts of respectability, unfashionable in our era of unfettered black self-determination — she grinned slowly.
"But this farce has serious consequences - in additional delays, in a greater risk Abu Qatada will be out on bail, in a risk he will sue the government for recommencing deportation proceedings while injunction 39 was still in place".
Billy Wilder, the director, writer and producer of both antic farce and serious drama who was nominated for 21 Academy Awards and won six, has died.
